Incoming UN chief Guterres must get priorities right

In early October 2016, the UN General Assembly, by unanimous recommendation of the UN Security Council, appointed the former UN High Commissioner for Refugees, António Guterres, as the next United Nations Secretary-General, to succeed Ban Ki-moon who will step down on December 31. Guterres is touted as a humanitarian advocate. However, the most anxious question to any fan of international politics, is longing to see whether Guterres will bring UN reforms, the most coveted undertaking. Of course, his predecessors proposed the reforms, for example Kofi Annan, but they never came to fruition by the end of their tenure. The UN is increasingly lambasted for being obtuse, unaccountable and ineffective amid growing global challenges such as humanitarian crises resulting from failure to uphold international rules or disregarding international humanitarian law, increasing numbers of refugees from Africa and Middle East virtually every single day, with thousands of children killed or forced to leave their homes to name but a few. Most of these challenges are triggered by senseless wars, and a lack of collective efforts to prevent these tragedies. UN, as a global body mandated to ensure peace and security internationally, should be overhauled to be a more efficient and effective organisation. More needs to be done to help the victims of wars; and we must not accept what we are witnessing as something normal. In particular, the UN Security Council, as one of the UN’s principal organs, was supposedly created primarily to bring or restore international peace and security. The fact that UN Security Council has failed to save many lives of people in various places, namely Rwanda, Syria, etc, shows its inability, hence a need for reforms to turn things around. It would be utterly unrealistic to maintain the status quo, yet the pressing global challenges remain unresolved. One of the most controversial issues, if not the single most sensitive one, concerns the composition and practice of the UN Security Council as the primary guarantor of peace and security internationally. Different alliances of states brought forward divergent proposals for Security Council reforms but were unsuccessful due to pushbacks from the P-5 (five Permanent Members). In spite of the dogged resistance from P-5, there’s also a lack of consensus among UN members on the matter. The P-5 have always taken advantage of divergence among UN non-permanent members. The last time the UN Security Council underwent significant reforms was in 1963 when the UN General Assembly passed a resolution expanding the number of non-permanent members from six to ten. Since then, attempts have been made at further reforms without success. For instance, in the aftermath of the war in Iraq, launched in 2003, a High-Level Panel, convened by then Secretary-General Kofi Annan to consider revisions to the UN Charter and the Security Council, recommended, among others, increasing the Council’s representation, especially from the developing world. The second proposal was the Uniting for Consensus plan, also calling for membership reform (adding five new non-permanent seats to the UNSC) as well as restrictions on the veto and changes to the Council’s working methods. A third reform proposal put forth by African states, the Ezulwini Consensus, proposed granting two African nations permanent membership in order to adddress the lack of representation from developing nations on the Council. It was also unsuccessful. One year later, the fourth one was proposed by Costa Rica, Jordan, Liechtenstein, Singapore, and Switzerland put forward the S5 plan, which largely focused on administrative and procedural changes to enhance “accountability, transparency and inclusiveness of [the Council’s] work, with a view to strengthening its legitimacy and effectiveness.” The S5 plan also called for P-5 members to voluntarily abstain from using the veto in matters of “genocide, crimes against humanity and serious violations of international humanitarian law.” Like the past ones, this proposal was shrugged off. Also, in 2010, during Obama’s first term in office, while on an official visit in India, in his speech, he promised to back India for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. He’s left with less than two months to vacate the Oval Office for the President-elect Donald Trump and there’s no possibility of honouring his pledge. One of the greatest expectations for the incoming UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, is to mobilise UN members to amend Article 108 of UN Charter, which requires the support of two thirds of the members of the General Assembly, including all the permanent members of the Security Council, to break the long-standing gridlock and allow other states on board. This would be the most remarkable achievement by a UN Secretary-General. Of course, Guterres is famously recognised for his achivements while at the helm of UN High Commissioner for Regugees, let’s wait and see whether he will do the same at the helm of United Nations. Africa and Latin America are the only regions unrepresented in the permanent seats of the Security Council. The writer is an international law expert

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Incoming UN chief Guterres must get priorities right