Majority wants UNSC to expand membership: India

UNITED NATIONS: A majority of UN members support the expansion of the permanent membership of the Security Council, which is being blocked by a vocal minority, India pointed out at a meeting on reforms.

“Will those who are speaking of democracy be ready to accept this democratic expression?” India’s Permanent Representative Syed Akbaruddin asked in a challenge to the obstructionists to the reform process while speaking at a meeting of the Intergovernmental Negotiations (IGN) on Council reforms on Monday. He said that a total of 129 countries of the 193-member UN had expressed support for expanding both the permanent and the non-permanent categories of Council membership and this had been codified in the framework document for negotiations circulated by Sam Kutesa, the then President of the General Assembly in 2015. They constituted 85 per cent of those who responded either in the framework document’s format or through letters to requests for inputs on reform, he said. Speaking at the meeting on behalf of the 13-member group that includes Pakistan and known as United for Consensus (UFC), Italy’s Permanent Representative Mariangela Zappia reiterated its opposition to adding more permanent members to the Council. The UFC has been the main source of obstruction in the reform process because of its opposition to adding permanent seats and it uses the tactic of opposing the adoption of a negotiating text to block the reform process from moving ahead. Japan’s Permanent Representive Yasuhisa Kawamura, who spoke on behalf of his country as well India, Brazil and Germany, emphasised the need to adopt a negotiating text if there was to be progress in the long-delayed reform process.

“Without negotiating based on a document, we fear that this session of the IGN will resemble those of the previous 10 years,” he said. The four countries, known as Group of Four or G-4, lobby jointly for expanding the permanent membership of the Council and mutually support each other for it. To highlight the stalemate, Kawamura said that he brought along the copy of a 2017 speech by Akbaruddin.