UNITED NATIONS, Nov 30: The United Nations on Tuesday unveiled a sweeping proposal to overhaul the organisation, including the Security Council, in what would be the biggest UN reform since its founding in 1945.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who commissioned a one-year study by a panel of experts that produced the proposals, endorsed the plan in what he said was an effort to meet the new global challenges of the 21st century.

"What is needed is a comprehensive system of collective security, one that tackles both old and new threats, and addresses the security concerns of all states - rich and poor, weak and strong," Annan said.

He said the proposals, which must be approved by member nations, set out "a broad framework for collective security and indeed gives a broader meaning to that concept appropriate for the new millennium."

The panel proposed two possible plans for expanding the Security Council and also attempted a first-ever UN definition of terrorism, a question long held up in UN debate largely because of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In setting out a blueprint for collective security decisions, however, the report also takes implicit aim at the United States over the war in Iraq. "There is little evident international acceptance of the idea of security being best preserved by a balance of power or by any single - even benignly motivated - superpower," the panel said.

"The yearning for an international system governed by the rule of law has grown," it said. "No state, no matter how powerful, can by its own efforts alone make itself invulnerable to today's threats."

Annan has repeatedly maintained that the concerns of many people around the globe run to disease and poverty rather than terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, and much of the report underlines his core argument.

It outlines three principles for collective security - that current threats go beyond national boundaries, that no nation is strong enough to defend itself alone, and that not every nation will be willing or able to protect its own people or refrain from harming its neighbours. -AFP