UNITED NATIONS, Sep 28 (APP): Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi on Monday said that the aspirants for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council — India, Brazil, Germany and Japan — have become “desperate” in their push to accomplish their objective, and urged the world community not to allow them to disrupt the membership-driven process, aimed at reforming the 15-nation body to make it more effective.
“While these attempts are not new, they (the four candidates) have become much more aggressive and almost desperate”, he told a virtual ministerial meeting of the Uniting for Consensus (UfC) group held on the sidelines of the 75th session of the UN General Assembly. Their desperation for Council’s permanent membership was evident in Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech to the 193-member Assembly on Saturday in which he posed the question, “For how long will India be kept out of the decision-making structures of the United Nations?”
The UfC group, which is led by Italy and Pakistan, strongly opposes any additional permanent members, on the ground that such a move will not make the Security Council more effective and will also undermine the fundamental principle of democracy that is based on periodic elections. It advocates more non-permanent members on the Council. The group was formed after India, Brazil, Germany and Japan, known as G-4, launched their “self-arrogated” claims to the permanent seats on the Security Council in 2005.
Since then they have shown no flexibility in their campaign for expanding the Council by 10 seats, with six additional permanent and four non-permanent members. As a result, the intergovernmental negotiations (IGN) aimed at restructuring the 15-member council, which began in 2009, are deadlocked as the member states remain sharply divided. In his remarks to UfC ministers, FM Qureshi said that since the G-4 had realized that their bid for permanent seats does not have support among the broader UN membership, they are trying to discredit the reform process, and even threatening to dismantle it.
“Since the G-4’s bid for permanent seats has failed to inspire the ‘confidence’ of member states, they are now attempting to create the ‘fear’ that the opportunity for reform may soon be lost, unless member states support their self-serving efforts to force through the reform of the global governance architecture including the Security Council”, he said. “The international community should not succumb to such fear-mongering,” FM Qureshi told the meeting.
Pakistan, he said, believes that during the 75th session, the UfC’s shared priorities on Council reform should include the following:
- To preserve the integrity of the membership-driven and IGN-centric reform process and continue the effort to promote a solution which enjoys the ‘widest possible political acceptance’ of all member states.
- Resist some member states’ push for procedural changes in the process, including the right to vote during the informal IGN meetings, as this is a clear attempt to sidestep consensus.
- A ‘consolidated text’ on the outcome of negotiations, proposed by the G-4, will not bridge fundamental divergences between respective positions, but will only crystallize the differences and turn them into deeper divisions, derailing the IGN process and may even spell an end to the near-term prospects of any Council reform.
- There is a need to strengthen the hands of friends within Africa as the continent’s group’s position is under assault both from within the group and from the G-4. If African unity collapses, so would the African ambition to achieve more equitable representation in the Security Council. Pakistan would propose the initiation of a regular Ministerial Level dialogue between the UfC and the African Union Committee of Ten (C-10) on the reform issue.
- Make a concerted effort to expand the UfC by inviting like-minded states to become full or associate members of the group as its position on the reform process is simple, logical and straightforward. The outreach effort undertaken to this end so far by UfC member states has been beneficial. Pakistan would be happy to host a meeting for regional countries in Islamabad to advance the group’s common goals.
FM Qureshi said :”Pakistan will continue to play its part to promote a comprehensive reform of the Security Council to make it a more democratic, representative, accountable, transparent and efficient body – a Council that is ‘fit for purpose’ to address contemporary and emerging challenges, confronted by the international community.”
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