Amina Mohammed sworn in as UN Deputy Secretary-general

Security Council reform is a critical part of what we do in the next few years, said the new UN Deputy Secretary-general, Amina Mogammed

UNITED NATIONS: Amina Mohammed, the new Deputy Secretary-general, has said that Security Council reform is a priority for the world body.

“Security Council reform is a critical part of what we do in the next few years and somehow we have to balance that if we are to address the (conflict) prevention agenda,” Mohammed told the media after being sworn in on Tuesday.

She was answering a reporter’s question if she considered reforming the Council to make it more representative a part of her mandate to work for the overall reform of the UN.

“On Security reform, that is something that I will work to support the SecretaryGeneral,” she said. India has invested heavily in Council reforms and is lobbying for a permanent seat on the body.

The process has failed to make progress in over nearly two decades. Mohammed, a former Environment Minister of Nigeria, was appointed by Secretary-general Antonio Guterres to the second highest job at the UN. Intense lobbying by nations and civil society organisations failed to elect a woman as the Secretarygeneral. The appointments of Mohammed and of Maria Luiza Ribeiro Viotti of Brazil as the Secretary-general’s chief de cabinet and Kyungwha Kang of South Korea as his special adviser on policy are efforts by Guterres to compensate for this setback to the cause of women and as the first step in his promise to bring about gender parity in the top rungs of the UN.

Asked about US President Donald Trump’s threatened cuts to Washington’s funding of international operations that could hit the UN, Mohammed acknowledged that it was a matter of “great concern”. But she said: “The important thing that we need to do is to continue to engage with our partners and to show how important it is not to decrease but to increase, and find different ways of doing so.

“I believe that we can find a way of leveraging other resources. Same member states, different ways, different means,” she added.

US President Donald Trump has signed a measure nixing a regulation aimed at keeping guns out of the hands of some severely mentally ill people.

The regulation, which was repealed on Tuesday, was part of a series of efforts taken by the Obama administration to try and curb gun violence after other efforts failed to advance in Congress, CNN reported.

The ban was promoted by Obama as part of his plan to increase control over access to firearms following the Newtown Sandy Hook school massacre in 2012, when 20 children and six teachers were gunned down.

The regulation, estimated to affect some 75,000 people, required the Social Security Administration to report to the federal government the names of people receiving disability benefits because of mental health problems, in order to block them from buying arms.

Tuesday’s decision was cheered by the National Rifle Association (NRA), the principal group promoting the right of individual citizens to bear arms. “On Wednesday’s Senate vote was the next step in rolling back some of the egre- gious government overreach that characterized the Obama era,” Chris W. Cox, Executive Director of the NRA, said last week when he heard about the Senate’s decision.

Everytown For Gun Safety President John Feinblatt said he expected more gun control rollbacks from the Trump administration. In a statement to NBC News, he called the action “just the first item on the gun lobby’s wish list” and accused the National Rifle Association of “pushing more guns, for more people, in more places.” Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, where the Newtown massacre occurred, indignantly pointed out that the repealed regulation only affected a small number of people.

“The risk is that someone who can’t literally deposit their own paycheck probably can’t, or likely can’t, responsibly own and protect a gun,” he said before voting “No” to the proposal in a plenary session of the Senate. Organisations that favour gun control also expressed their objections.

“Make no mistake, this vote was really about deepening the gun industry’s customer pool, at the expense of those in danger of hurting themselves or others,” said Dan Gross, President of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

Asked about US President Donald Trump’s threatened cuts to Washington’s funding of international operations that could hit the UN, Mohammed acknowledged that it was a matter of ‘great concern’