UN formally opens talks on Security Council reform
UN: The UN General Assembly on Thursday formally launched
inter-governmental negotiations aimed at expanding the 15-member
Security Council to make it more representative and more effective.
At the initiative of Assembly president Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann,
members held a closed-door plenary session chaired by Afghan Ambassador
Zahir Tanin, who was tasked with shepherding the negotiations, expected
to last for several months.
The Assembly agreed to tackle five key issues: categories of
membership, the question of the veto, geographic representation, the
size of an enlarged council and its working methods, as well as the
relationship between the council and the General Assembly.
The substantive bargaining was to begin on March 4, with additional
sessions slated for March and April before a second round of
negotiations on concrete proposals in May, according to D’Escoto.
After 15 years of drawn-out consultations on the divisive issue, the
192-member Assembly agreed last September to launch the process of
actual negotiations this month, after a report by five “facilitators”
found broad support for council enlargement but no consensus on how to
bring it about.
The authors of the report gave no suggestion for a final solution,
but noted that many members seemed willing to look for compromise.
The powerful Security Council currently has 10 rotating,
non-permanent members elected for two years and five, veto-wielding
permanent ones (China, the United States, France, Britain and Russia).
Its makeup has remained largely unchanged since the United Nations
was established in 1945.
In 2005, a so-called Group of Four (G4) countries — Germany, Brazil,
India and Japan — made a strong push to join the council as permanent
members, along with two African countries, but without veto rights.
But their bid failed to get enough support as it ran into strong
opposition from regional rivals, such as Italy, Pakistan and Argentina.
France’s UN Ambassador Jean-Maurice Ripert said Thursday that his
government backed permanent membership for the G4 and up to two African
countries.
But in view of the opposition of some countries to this formula, he
said Britain and France offered to break the impasse by proposing “an
interim reform.”
“Let’s create in the interim a category of elected members elected
for a longer term” of five, six or eight years, Ripert said.
Ripert recalled that another intergovernmental conference was planned
at the end of the interim period “to assess the impact on the work of
the council, its effectiveness and its legitimacy.”
UNITED NATIONS,
Friday, AFP
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