Reformed UN Security Council need of the day

Lionel Wijesiri

Addressing the 64th Session of UN General Assembly in New York on September 26, Prime Minister Ratnasiri Wickramanayaka said, “The reform of the United Nations and the UN Security Council must be a high priority. We believe that the objective of the reform process should be to strengthen multilateralism and to promote greater democracy, transparency, effectiveness and accountability within a more democratic United Nations system. And in tandem we need to take measures to pursue the four pillars that are fundamental to our future as enunciated by President Obama”.

A few days before the Sri Lankan Prime Minister spoke, Libya’s President criticized the United Nations’ Security Council during his address to the UN General Assembly recently. In the 90-minute speech, Muammar Gaddafi said the veto-wielding nations of the Security Council were ignoring the views of the full 192 members of the General Assembly and the principles of the UN Charter.

“The preamble (of the Charter) says all nations are equal whether they are small or big,” Gaddafi said in his address. But he accused the permanent members of the council of undermining other States. “The veto (held by the five permanent UN members) is against the Charter, we do not accept it and we do not acknowledge it,” Gaddafi said.

He said the Council had failed to prevent or intervene in 65 wars that have taken place since the United Nations was established in 1948. “It should not be called the Security Council, it should be called the ‘terror council’,” he said, adding that the permanent members treat smaller countries as ‘second class and despised’ nations.

The Council

The Security Council is the United Nations’ most powerful body. In Statute, it has “primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security.” Five powerful countries sit as ‘permanent members’ along with ten other member states who are elected for two-year terms. Since 1990, the Council has dramatically increased its activity and it now meets in nearly continuous session. It dispatches military operations, imposes sanctions, mandates arms inspections, deploys human rights and election monitors and more.

The Security Council is part Parliament, part secret diplomatic conclave. Its procedures and working methods can be puzzling and mysterious. The Council follows a Program of Work set out by its President, a post that rotates alphabetically among all Council Members on a monthly basis.

The Council also frequently deploys Peacekeeping missions that bring soldiers and police directly into conflict zones. Peacekeeping is the UN’s largest and most expensive activity and it can be controversial, especially when ‘robust’ operations apply lethal force, sometimes killing the innocent.

Reforms

Historically, the Council was conceived in 1945 as a reflection of the post-War balance of powers; twenty years later, in 1965, it was reformed for the principal purpose of reflecting a post-colonial world. However, critics believe that the reformation has not been effective.

A good example is Africa, which, despite its expanded role in planetary equilibrium, continues to be seriously under-represented on the Council. Then there those are small States with less than one million inhabitants that make up nearly one-quarter of the UN members, and who are demanding a voice of their own on the Security Council; and the many small insular States of the Pacific, Caribbean and Indian Ocean fighting to survive the effects of climate change.

UN Charter

Based on the UN Charter that all member nations signed, the Security Council passes binding resolutions of critical international import. But many nations have argued that the current structure of the UN Security Council is in need of reform to become more inclusive, as the world has changed dramatically since its post-WWII inception. One classic example is the United States who (with its ‘Coalition’) began the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It did so in (what many would call) in defiance of the UN Security Council, underlining ongoing questions about the international body’s ultimate power to mediate conflicts among powerful countries.

By the early 2000s, many countries began to talk openly about the effeteness of the Security Council. Particularly, G4, comprising Japan, India, Germany and Brazil, began leading the charge for reforming UN Security Council structure. One of the key reform issues was the Veto. The Group was in the opinion that the 5-members would not make the Security Council globally representative. There were many more international actors playing a key global and regional role.

Flexibility

What is needed today is a new model with the necessary flexibility. The Council should possess flexibility and adaptation to the changing world. It needs to recognize the crucial stabilizing role it plays, alongside other regional forces. Any proposed new system must reflect not only the size of populations but also the differing economic and military capabilities of nations.

Human rights

The degree of ‘internal legitimacy’ of governments in terms of human rights and democracy could become another factor determining voting weights or voting rights.

Countries such as India and Japan must gain a strong voice. Latin America, Africa and the Arab world also must see an increase in their influence. There should be permanent global participation in the Security Council through regional constituencies, although the number of seats at any one time should remain in the neighborhood of 15 in order to permit constructive debate and a degree of cohesion.

The present Security Council is far too loosely organized and depends far too much on the management of the permanent five. By design, it has only minor institutional support from the Secretariat, placing impossible burdens on the delegations of elected members and weakening all efforts at institutional development. Incredibly, the Council’s rules of procedure remain ‘provisional’ after over sixty years of operation. Most of the Council’s business takes place behind closed doors, in ‘consultations of the whole,’ away from scrutiny and accountability and lacking any record (such as minutes) that could be referenced by future members.

The Council passes many resolutions but only haphazardly enforces them, fueling resistance to perceived ‘double standards’ in its actions. Too often it seems the captive of great power politics with little connection to the needs of the world’s peoples. A smart politician once said that the ten elected members of the Council are like ‘tourists’ on a long distance train.

Demands

If we recap the demands made by the political analysts, critics and Statesmen during the past two decades for the reformation of Security Council, they could be briefly enumerated as follows : - that the Council be: (1) more representative, (2) more accountable, (3) more legitimate, (4) more democratic, (5) more transparent, (6) more effective and (7) more fair and even-handed (no double standards). Such demands seem reasonable, but they are not easily compatible.

A Council of forty members, for example, might be more representative, but it would hardly be more effective. Still, many reformers have sought a more broadly democratic institution that would weaken the oligarchy and create a more diverse and broadly representative body.

However, in spite of all good intentions all critics finally end up without an answer to the sixty four million dollar question: how can even the best-organized Council be expected to function effectively and fairly in a world where great powers, like Tyrannosaurs, stalk the global landscape?

Powerful governments that claim to champion ‘freedom’, ‘democracy,’ and ‘good governance,’ have been known to behave despotically in the international arena, bending small states to their will and acting in violation of international law. Such powers sit in the Council and cannot be expected to solve problems that they themselves have created. This can be called the ‘foxes guarding the chicken coop’ problem.

Some reform proposals, couched in democratic language, would multiply this problem - enlarging the oligarchy by adding a number of other powerful governments. More permanent members would scarcely make the Council more representative, accountable, transparent, legitimate or even-handed. Self-interest, not democracy, motivates these membership claims and a Council loaded with more permanent members would suffer from gridlock and political sclerosis.

Effectiveness

Human progress can be measured by the fact that we are living in a century where unilateral military operations based on power alone are intolerable. But the spread of the ideology of peace does not mean that threats to security have disappeared.

At times, preventive action may be necessary. Many lives would have been saved in Africa, for example, if the international community could have acted decisively and quickly.

The events in Iraq also have demonstrated that the key issue for world security is really the relationship of the big powers to the UN Security Council.

The need for an effective UN Security Council reflects the central strategic certainty of the post-Cold War period: security threats are no longer likely to take the form of war between states, but will instead consist in acts of terror, civil wars and massacres of civilian populations.

These threats are often related to economic chaos and basic failures in national governance and international military action will often be needed to meet them head on. But the legitimacy of any international military action that goes beyond immediate self-defense requires broad international approval and action without legitimacy is bound to fail.