UNITED NATIONS (AP) – The 191-member UN General Assembly yesterday adopted a watered-down document for world leaders to approve at a UN summit, shedding many of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s ambitious goals after weeks of bitter debate.

The 35-page compromise document is supposed to galvanise global action to combat poverty and launch a major reform of the United Nations itself. But to reach a consensus, most of the text’s details were gutted in favour of abstract language.

A definition of terrorism and details on how to replace the discredited UN Commission on Human Rights will not be included. US-led efforts to overhaul UN management have been diluted, while nuclear nonproliferation is not mentioned at all.

“Obviously we didn’t get everything we wanted and with 191 member states it’s not easy to get an agreement,” Annan said. “All of us would have wanted more but we can work with what we have been given, and it’s a step forward.”

Diplomats called the document a breakthrough after so much debate. Several were pleased with the creation of a peace-building commission and a long section on development.

That includes a mention of the desire by “many developed countries” to spend 0.7 percent of their gross national product on development.

“Don’t expect Rome to be built in a day, it wasn’t,” Britain’s UN Ambassador Emyr Jones-Parry said. “Against the difficulty of this negotiation, it’s complexity, this is a very substantial gain.”

The compromise document came after weeks of debate crescendoed into several days of marathon negotiation.

Some diplomats had feared that negotiations would continue into the summit that begins today.

The outgoing president of the General Assembly, Gabon’s Jean Ping, presented the compromise yesterday afternoon in hopes of bridging the deepest divides and moving away from bitter line-by-line negotiations that had bogged down the debate.

“It would be wrong to claim more than is realistic and accurate about what these reforms are,” US Ambassador John Bolton said. “They represent steps forward, but this is not the alpha and the omega, and we never thought it would be.”

Though Annan said he was pleased, the document was a step backward for him. In March, when he had unveiled his proposals, Annan had urged world leaders to expand the size of the Security Council, come up with a definition of terrorism and accept that they have a “responsibility to protect” those being killed, which requires collective action.

Last week, a committee investigating the scandal-tainted UN oil-for-food programme had called for wide-ranging management reforms. The committee, led by former US Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, said that the United Nations would need a complete overhaul to tackle programs like oil-for-food in the future.

But efforts to expand the council were abandoned because of longtime national differences. “Responsibility to protect” was whittled down to nations’ obligations to protect their own citizens. The document says nations should “make all efforts” toward a convention against terrorism but doesn’t try to define it.

Diplomats said they had tried to tackle too much at once, and had to lower their expectations from the document.

“I think we tried to have a full plate and we were unable to eat so much in a single gulp,” Costa Rica’s UN Ambassador Bruno Stagno said earlier yesterday.

The failure of world leaders to adopt an ambitious plan for development and reform disappointed some non-governmental organisations.

They fear that leaving the tough decisions to the 191-member General Assembly, where even seemingly innocuous initiatives can stall for years, is the quickest way to sink Annan’s agenda.

“If world leaders do nothing more than adopt a broad, vague text that defers all substantive decisions to the General Assembly, they will have squandered a historic opportunity,” Yvonne Terlingen, Amnesty International’s UN representative, said in a statement.

Several nations were angry with the way the document was pushed through the General Assembly before it was translated from English into the five other official UN languages, a violation of UN protocol. That gave ambassadors little time to review it.

“This process is a clear violation of the most basic elements governing democratic processes,” Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Ali Rodriguez said.

The debate over the summit has led some to question if the United Nations can be reformed at all, especially when such decisions have to be accepted by all member states.

Security Council reform, for example, has bedeviled the United Nations for more than a decade. Each time the issue surfaces, diplomats say they believe the will is there for change, and each time they fail.

“I’m very pragmatic in relation to the United Nations,” Australia’s Prime Minister John Howard said yesterday. “One cannot ignore the fact that we still live in a world of nation states.”