Dec 10 , 2015
News
Pakistan suggests reforms in Security Council
Dr Maleeha says 15-member council should be accountable to General Assembly
APP
NEW YORK – Pakistan’s Ambassador to UN Dr Maleeha Lodhi stressed the need of reforms in the Security Council and said that the 15-member body’s selective implementation of its resolutions – especially regarding the right of people to self-determination and where people are under foreign occupation – has eroded its credibility.Speaking to about 100 visiting members of UK’s Royal College of Defence Studies, she said that the council’s failure to resolve the longstanding Arab-Israel conflict and the more recent crises in the Middle East and Syria highlighted the many notable occasions it had fallen short of playing its role in the maintenance of international peace and security.
“And its inability to enforce its own resolutions, for example on Kashmir plebiscite, represents its most persistent failure,” she said in her remarks on “national views of the Security Council” at the event hosted by the British Mission to the UN. She said that the Security Council was the only global institution available to take decisions on peace and security as also to authorise the use of force.
As a seven-term non-permanent member, she said that Pakistan had tried to improve the council’s working methods and especially to enhance transparency and inclusiveness. During Pakistan’s presidency of the council, a resolution on UN peacekeeping – to which Islamabad was a major contributor – was adopted marking a watershed in this respect the first comprehensive resolution on peacekeeping in over 10 years.
She said that Pakistan feels that the permanent members were interpreting the council’s mandate to maintain international peace and security rather liberally, sometimes using thematic issues to expand its agenda into areas, such as human right, thus, encroaching on the role of other UN bodies, including the General Assembly and other UN bodies.
The ambassador said that the growing tendency to use the UN Charter’s Chapter-VII (sanctions) provisions led to a de-emphasis and under utilisation of the equally binding Chapter-VI measures on settlement of the disputes. This had risked giving coercive multilateralism primacy over cooperative multilateralism,” she said, adding it had trivialised resolutions not adopted under the Chapter-VII.
While the council acts on behalf of the UN’s wider membership not in lieu of it, she said that in practice the five permanent members determine the council’s agenda and priorities. The council should be accountable to the General Assembly where all member states were represented – but actually the council virtually acts on its own.
“Important decisions continue to be taken in a closed club, allowing inadequate time to non-permanent members to deliberate,” she pointed out. She said that there was little meaningful interaction between council and the general membership. Peacekeeping missions were a flagship enterprise of the council, but sufficient consultation and engagement with troop contributing countries remain infrequent and limited, she said.
– Pakistan opposing more permanent seats –
“One of the most important processes that can significantly improve the council’s transparency, accountability and effectiveness was reform of the Security Council,” the envoy said. But this process had remained deadlocked on a question that should not be the central one. “If the reason for council’s ineffectiveness is differences among the existing permanent members, increasing their number will reinforce not address this weakness,” she said.
She said that Pakistan opposed creation of more permanent seats, and supported an increase in elected seats of the Security Council. She said that Pakistan was also ready to look at a compromise solution whereby longer-term seats were created with the possibility of one immediate re-election. “There should be no extension of veto power. We are ready to consider proposals that aim at restricting the use of veto in mass atrocities and grave humanitarian situation,” she said.
Courtesy www.dailytimes.com.pk