UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 28 (Xinhuanet) -- The UN member states have made progress in the push for institutional reform, but a threat to withhold some US' dues if benchmarks are not met by certain deadlines could provoke a backlash from other states on such important issues as a clear definition of terrorism, a senior UN official warned Wednesday.

    Briefing the International Relations Committee of the US House of Representatives on the world summit, UN chief of staff Mark Malloch Brown said the negotiations on many issues fell short of UN hopes, having been hampered by unresolved differences between member states and "a regrettable amount of mistrust."

    "In March, when the secretary general proposed an agenda for the summit, he deliberately set the bar high, since in international negotiations you never get everything you ask," he said in the speech prepared for delivery.

    Annan also presented the reforms as a package -- development, security, human rights and UN reform -- not because he expected them to be adopted without change, but because states would be more likely to compromise on some issues if they received concessions on the issues to which they assigned a higher priority, Malloch Brown said.

    "To be quite specific, the US and others who share the same reform agenda were not going to get what they wanted on management reform, on human rights, or on terrorism unless they showed sensitivity to the views of those many governments for whom development is the overriding priority -- and vice versa," he said.

    For the first time, he said, the entire UN membership has accepted "the responsibility to protect" populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and the funding for the UN's human rights machinery would be doubled from 2 percent of the organization's budget.

    "I believe one important consequence of the reforms must be to allow Israel to play its full part as a member state in all the UN's affairs and no longer to be judged by harsher standards than those applied to other member states," he added.

    He noted that the US House of Representatives had passed a bill bearing the name of Committee Chairman Henry Hyde to ensure UN reform.

    "But I hope you might now also understand why we respectfully disagree with the method that you adopted, which mandates withholding of U.S. dues from the United Nations if certain benchmarks and deadlines are not met."

    "I fear that this would provoke a backlash among other member states, whose effect would be not to advance but to set back the priorities that you and we share -- such as an effective Human Rights Council, the extensive reform of UN management, a clear definition of terrorism because it would shatter the pro-reform coalition among UN members," Malloch Brown said.

    The key to success was broadening that coalition. "In this effort, the US is an essential player, but by no means the only one," he said. Enditem