Daily Times

After more than a month of controversy, a UN Security Council buffeted between the United States, China and Russia is finally expected this week to adopt its first resolution on the coronavirus pandemic, amid calls for intensified international cooperation.

A hopeless task? A wake-up call for multilateralist forces crushed by resurging nationalism? Or perhaps a first step toward a geopolitical reorganization and the recasting of an international body founded in 1945 with the express mission of preventing and containing global crises?

Diplomats and experts surveyed by AFP were less than sanguine.

Gandhi once said that being late can itself be an “act of violence,” one ambassador recalled, speaking on grounds of anonymity to express impatience with the UN’s top body for its embarrassing silence in the face of the worst global crisis since World War II.

The Security Council has conferred only once on the pandemic, and that was in virtual session — a videoconference held April 9 at the initiative of Germany and Estonia.

The current resolution, jointly proposed by Tunisia and France, calls for “enhanced coordination among all countries,” a “cessation of hostilities” and a “humanitarian pause” in countries in conflict.

The resolution aims to support the efforts of Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and of several UN agencies struggling to contain the devastating political, economic and social consequences of the deadly virus.

The text is partly “a face-saving device that allows the Security Council to claim that it has not been entirely inactive,” said Richard Gowan, UN director of the International Crisis Group, a center for analysis. “But it does have some substantive benefits too.” Might the benefits of a resolution binding on all UN members be seen in crisis zones in Syria, Yemen or elsewhere in the Middle East? In Afghanistan, Colombia or Africa? “A global ceasefire is very laudable, but the challenge is how you translate that into actions in individual country context,” another ambassador said.

A P5 videoconference

The French-Tunisian text merges two proposals negotiated in parallel over several weeks, one under Tunis’s leadership among the 10 non-permanent members of the Security Council (the “E10”) and the other by France among the five permanent members (the “P5”). But while the two texts share the goal of improved cooperation and support for widespread cease-fires, neither achieved complete unity in its Security Council bloc, diplomats said.