With UNSC ‘crumbling’, India says naysayers should be stopped from blocking reform

United Nations, Nov 15: With the Security Council “crumbling under the weight of 21st-century geopolitical realities”, India has said that “naysayers” should be stopped from blocking its reform. The negotiations for reforming the Council that was started 14 years ago should be made to deliver concrete outcomes within a fixed time frame, Pratik Mathur, a counsellor at India’s Mission, said on Tuesday at a meeting on revitalising the General Assembly.
“Naysayers cannot be allowed to hold the intergovernmental negotiations (IGN) process hostage in perpetuity,” he said referring to the machinery set up by the Assembly for Council reform. He said that the reform negotiations should adopt a text-based process and not be blocked by procedural tactics.
The IGN is stalled because it has been prevented from adopting a negotiating text that would form the basis of discussions to progress by setting a firm agenda and recording the points of convergence and divergence that need to be worked on.
A 12-member group of countries known as Uniting for Consensus, which is led by Italy and has Pakistan as a leading member, has used procedural tactics to prevent the adoption of a negotiating text because they oppose expanding the permanent membership of the Council, a demand of the majority of UN’s 193 members.
Mathur said that there was “widespread recognition that the current architecture is anachronistic, and indeed ineffective” and in a reference to the exclusion of Africa and Latin America from permanent membership he said that it was “deeply unfair” as it denied “entire continents and regions of voice in a forum that deliberates their future”. (IANS)