By Arul Louis United Nations, Aug 23 : India has warned that the global body UN could disappear and be replaced by more democratic organizations in the event that the UN Security Council is not changed to be more relevant to current geopolitical reality.
India’s Permanent Representative to the UN, Ruchira Kamboj said on Monday, “A truly representative Security Council is the urgent requirement of the moment.”
“Else there’s a serious chance of the United Nations being superseded by other multilateral and multilateral groups that are more transparent, more representative and more democratic and, consequently more efficient,” she added.
“The most urgent thing therefore, we must do is make the Security Council more representative of developing nations, so as to reflect the realities of geopolitics today,” Kamboj said at the Council meeting on “Maintenance of International Peace and Security Promoting Common Security Through Dialogue and Cooperation”.
In a world that is very different from the one of 1945, when the UN was established, she asked, “Is the UN and, in particular, the Security Council which is the primary body charged with the task of keeping peace in the world and security, able to stay relevant?”
Over two years of efforts to overhaul the Security Council which is stuck in the post-World War II system have been unsuccessful due to the presence of the opposition of a small number of countries that are led by Italy and which includes Pakistan.
Similar to in the past, discussions to discuss Council reforms were moved in the last month to the following session of the General Assembly after failing to even adopt a negotiating plan upon which discussions could be upon.
India is pushing for reforms to the Council and has staked an interest in an unassailable seat in the newly restructured body.
“In my own country, which currently represents more than one sixth of humanity We believe that until we reform, improve and change multilateral governance structures we’d be find ourselves lacking,” Kamboj added.
The need for reforms is based on the sence of urgency because the Council stuck in a the system of voting against of the permanent members has been unable take action on Russia’s incursion of Ukraine.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres drew attention to the snoozing of the Council.
In the meantime “today’s global security system is being tested as never before” he said.
“Lingering disagreements between the world’s top powers, including at this Council -are limiting our collective ability to respond.”
“Many of the systems established decades ago are currently facing challenges that were not imagined by our predecessors – cyberwarfare, terrorists, and the use of lethal autonomous weapons” Guterres added.
Kamboj stated, “A body that was created in the aftermath of the second world war, and is still reflecting in its decisions even 77 years after the fact the fundamentally flawed notion of “to the winners be the spoils’, continues to be faced with the crisis of trust and credibility.”
In the time the UN was created in 1945 the seats that remained of the Council were allocated to the five countries that were on the side of victory of World War II, exiled India which was then an independent British colony.Today, India is a member of the economic powerhouses such as Germany and Japan and the entire Latin American and African countries.
The permanent representative of India to the UN requested, “How do we explain the fact that the African continent is not given the privilege of having a permanent presence in the Security Council, despite a majority of issues being discussed with by the Council being from that region? What are we doing to ensure the common security in Africa even though the body does not give them representation on a regular basis?”
She said that even though radicalism, terrorism threats from the new and emerging technologies pandemics, climate change and an intensifying geopolitical battle are in the world’s news and the world at large, the UN response has “been only intermittent or at most”.
“It is evident today that the challenges that the world is faced with cannot be addressed with by outdated systems and structures of governance,” she said.
Guterres also noted, “Many of the systems that were developed decades ago are facing challenges that were inconceivable to our predecessors, such as cyberwarfare, terrorism, and deadly self-propelled weapons.”
(Arul Louis is reached at [email protected] and he can be followed on Twitter at @arulouis)
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