Countries like India, Germany, Brazil and Japan are “completely needed” as permanent members of a reformed and enlarged UN Security Council to better reflect present-day realities and including these key members to the UN high-table is among France’s “strategic” most important consideration, the French envoy to the UN added in a statement.
“In terms of the policy, France and Germany have a strong policy which is to work together to enlarge the Security Council and to succeed in terms of the negotiations that should lead to the enlargement of the Security Council that we consider absolutely needed to better reflect the world as it is. There is no question about it,” France’s Permanent Representative to the UN Francois Delattre told the journalists last week.
While speaking alongside German envoy to the UN Christoph Heusgen at the end of Germany’s Presidency of the Council for April, Mr Delattre highlighted that France considers that nations like “Germany, Japan, India, Brazil and a fair representation of Africa in particular are absolutely needed at the table to get towards a fairer representation of the Security Council. This is for us a matter of priority.”
Noting that when France and Germany launched their alliance for multi-materialism, he said it signifies that the two nations strongly believe in the UN as the core of today’s global governance and that they strongly believe in “multi-lateralism and means that we are actively working to reform and in some respects to refound, reinvent multi-lateralism so that it is really efficient for the decades to come.”
India is now at the spearhead of efforts at the UN to advance for the long-pending reform of the Security Council, as it certainly deserves a place at the UN high table as a ‘permanent member’.
India’s Permanent Representative to the UN Ambassador, Syed Akbaruddin said that on the issue of ‘Categories of Membership”, a total of 113 Member States, out of 122 who submitted their positions in the Framework Document.
“In short, more than 90 per cent of the written submissions in the document are in favour of expansion in both categories of membership specified in the Charter,” he had said.
Mr Akbaruddin said that while reform at the UN is a process instead of an event, “there is no process known to us here that has traversed winding pathways in the manner as this process of the Reform of the Security Council.”
“In terms of inertia too, it has no peer. While the world is not what it was when we began the process, the objections to moving forward remain the same. While the global challenges of the 21st century have multiplied, we remain divided even about the process to adopt in order to move forward,” he had said.
France also maintained that if the calamity of recent times have confirmed the UN centrality, they reinforced the need to make the organisation much more effective and more representative of the current balances world wide.
“That is why France pushes for the expansion of the Security Council by supporting the accession to a permanent seat of Germany, Brazil, India, Japan, as well as a greater presence of African countries,” according to the Permanent Mission of France.