Malta at the Security Council: More of the same?

For the second time in its history, Malta is serving as a nonpermanent member of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC).

Well done! This means that Malta, with the other 5 permanent and 9 nonpermanent members of the UNSC, has been additionally burdened with safeguarding international peace and security. Quite an onerous task indeed.

The government has declared that it will be trying to push matters such as climate change, sealevel rise, and children in armed conflict onto the UNSC’s agenda. These, indeed, are laudable initiatives.

Nonetheless, it has to be remembered that the principal purpose of the UNSC is to maintain international peace and security. The United Nations (UN) Charter, in Article 1, Paragraph 1, clearly provides for this august purpose: ‘to maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace’. Quite a noble aim, though compliance therewith, past experience has shown, leaves much to be desired.

The thorny issue that the UNSC needs to address is the drastic changes imperative to the UN Organization’s Charter where the membership of the UNSC is radically altered to do away with the five permanent members’ right to exercise their veto to proposed measures intended to fulfil Article 1 above-quoted. Post-Second World War history teaches us that the permanent five have made it their avowed task to block one time or another – for selfish national interests shorn of fraternal internationalism – peaceful initiatives aimed to secure in practice international peace and security. By doing so, they have made the UN the laughing stock and a parody of international peace and security. Were there no veto to cast, the UN would have taken a more proactive approach to past and current wars and conflicts, and hopefully there would have been no war of aggression in Ukraine and armed conflicts and tensions in other parts of the world, be it in Syria, Palestine, Myanmar, Libya, etc.

The government has issued a document ‘Malta 2023-2024 United Nations Security Council’ which chronicles Malta’s salutary input to the UN and lists its contribution to peace and security in the past but fails to identify its vision for that Council in relation to international peace and security for 2023-2024. This is a grave omission as it does not address the very raison d’etre of the UNSC. When one reads this document from an international peace and security perspective, one queries whether it is nothing more and nothing less than hot air.

Whilst issues such as climate change and the oceans; children and armed conflict; women, peace, and security, are pertinent subjects for discussion at UNSC level, government should not miss the forest for the trees as it tends to do on domestic affairs. The real burning issues for the UNSC are international war, civil war, armed conflict in all its permutations and combinations, mass atrocity crimes (especially genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, crimes against peace, ethnic cleaning, population transfers), the proliferation of all forms of weapons of mass destruction – biological, chemical, nuclear, and conventional, world poverty, various forms of trafficking (especially in persons), terrorism, and other international grave crimes, not to mention irregular migration and dictatorships that foment it.

What Malta should have addressed in the above document are three measures: first, a strategic plan for effective world governance; second, a comprehensive reform of the UN Organization and the Charter that establishes it; and, third, and this is the most important factor for the first two to succeed, getting on board UN Member States who are not only willing but totally committed towards world peace and justice. The UN has been around since 1945. Too much time has passed since then and yet not even one single amendment has been made in the last seventy-five years to revise its Charter that has remained fossilized and out of synch with reality. Since then, the world has changed completely. The cold war came and went. Bipolarity is dead and buried. Not only an urgent stock taking of whether the UN in general and the UNSC in particular have achieved their goals is imperative, but also how the UNSC’s deficiencies in halting threats and actual criminal acts to world peace should be addressed. The time is ripe to set the ball rolling even though, swimming against the current as this would be, involves letting out the skeletons in the cupboard and attracting the ire of those UN member states that are comfortable with the status quo.

The inevitable question that therefore arises is: will Malta be in a position, as it was in the past with various initiatives it proposed at international level, to make a real difference through its two-year membership of the UNSC? Of course, only time will tell. But the writing on the wall is not encouraging for government has so far failed to address the main bone of contention for which the UNSC was tasked: international peace and security. Climate change, sea level rise and others mentioned in government’s document – important items as they are – are peripheral to nuclear annihilation. Pressing conflicts such as those in Ukraine and Syria remain unaddressed.

Indeed, it is not known, in detail, what are Malta’s objectives in this field, that is, whether it will assume a low profile and just simply play the game, serve as the uncritical mouthpiece of the European Union whilst forgetting its neutral status as gets the impression that it is doing on the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine, or address routine and extraordinary issues as they come along, as it appears to be the case so far. Or will it be bold enough to propose its own made in Malta plan of action as to how to be relevant and effective, even though it might not succeed to implement that plan in its entirety or even partially due to external considerations beyond its control, but would have at least ignited the initial spark. So far, it appears that Malta’s attitude at the UNSC will not be a game changer but business as usual. But that has been, in sum, Malta’s foreign policy post-Mintoff: docile, feeble, conforming, submissive, and lacking self-assertiveness.

If from the 28-page government document, the lavish glossy photos are removed, very much little substance remains proposing concrete ways ahead for international peace and security. This is indeed a pity for the occasion to serve on the UNSC is a one-off opportunity that government has decided to waste once it has not well-planned for it. Gone are the times when a Labour government played a seminal role in international relations such as at the OSCE Helsinki conference that put Mediterranean security on the agenda of European security, or a Nationalist government that facilitated the end of the cold war at the Malta Summit between Mikhail Gorbachev and George H.W. Bush.

What action will Malta take to stop new states from acquiring the nuclear bomb? Or to convince nuclear states to reduce their nuclear arsenal and subsequently uncommission all nuclear bombs? Or to prevent future perpetration of mass atrocity crimes that continue to be a hallmark of national state policy and governance? Or to direct arms spending towards world poverty? Or to curtail inter-state wars or civil wars that bring about failed states that in turn end up a menace to international peace and security? Or to address world poverty that is one of the reasons for irregular migration? Or extending core crimes for other important internationally recognised crimes such as trafficking in persons and terrorism? Or declaring the core crimes established by the International Criminal Court’s Rome Statute as part of customary international law? Or authorising the ICC Prosecutor and Court to investigate, try and punish offending nontreaty members states for core crime commission against ICC member states? Or recognizing Malta’s neutrality through an UNSC resolution? Hopefully we will be lucky to get non-evasive answers to these questions, not directly by government but through how Malta will play the game at the UNSC table, in the current and next year.

As a neutral small state that is not inspired by world domination, global influence, or international power, Malta should raise these issues even if they are not music to the ears of the UNSC permanent 5 for if it is not Malta who will place effective reform of the UNSC on the latter’s agenda, who has an interest to do so?

“The inevitable question that therefore arises is: will Malta be in a position, as it was in the past with various initiatives it proposed at international level, to make a real difference through its two-year membership of the UNSC?”