Daily Times

The United Kingdom intends to try and speed up the slow-moving process of United Nations Security Council reform by raising the issue at the 15-member Council as a priority item under its presidency for the month of July, Ambassador Barbara Woodward said Monday. “I recognize that it has been a very frustrating process,” The UK envoy said as she briefed UN correspondents on the programme of work of the Security Council for the month.

The reform process, known as Intergovernmental Negotiations (IGN), ended its meetings for the current 77th session after making some progress, and then for the 25th time rolled over the negotiations to the next session, which begins in September.

One of the impediments to advancing the reforms is the inability of member states to adopt a text on which to base the negotiations because of the lack of consensus on key issues.

Ambassador Woodward said that UK backed moving to text-based negotiations, but acknowledged that “There wasn’t enough support for that to make immediate progress.”

She said that she had been in contact with IGN co-facilitators who led the reform process, Permanent Representatives Tareq AlBanai of Kuwait and Alexander Marschik of Austria, and “I know that they’ve tried very hard indeed but there is such a wide range of views that it seems very difficult indeed, to make progress”. The UK envoy said, “We want to see the expansion of the Council’s permanent seats to include India, Brazil, Germany and Japan and African representation. It’s high time the Council entered the 2020s,” In this regard, Ms. Woodward referred to remarks by UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly last week in which he announced the UK’s ambition to drive forward reform of the multilateral system. A correspondent pointed out that the Italy/Pakistan-led Uniting for Consensus (UfC) group opposes any expansion in the permanent category on the ground that it would make the Council unworkable, Ms. Woodward said, “U.K’s position on the UN Security Council reform has been out in the front for a long time now.”

Questioned about U.K’s choice of the four countries as permanent members, she said that it had to do with geographic balance and recognizing their rising influence. Last week, Pakistan’s UN Ambassador Munir Akram told an IGN meeting that progress has indeed been made during the current session.

“The IGN has held constructive discussions this year on all the five interlinked ‘clusters’ of issues on Security Council reform,” Ambassador Akram said, adding, “As evident … the areas of convergence have been broadened, and divergences have been further reduced…”

Full-scale negotiations to reform the Security Council began in the General Assembly in February 2009 on five key areas — the categories of membership, the question of veto, regional representation, size of an enlarged Security Council, and working methods of the council and its relationship with the General Assembly.

Despite a general agreement on enlarging the Council, as part of the UN reform process, member states remain divided over the details.

The so-called Group of Four — India, Brazil, Germany and Japan — who seek for themselves permanent seats on the Council have shown no flexibility in their campaign for expanding the Council by 10 seats, with six additional permanent and four non-permanent members.

On the other hand, the UfC group, which firmly opposes additional permanent members, has proposed a new category of members — not permanent members — with longer duration in terms and a possibility to get re-elected.

The Security Council is currently composed of five permanent members — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — and 10 non-permanent members elected to serve for two years.