UNITED NATIONS: Pakistan has again urged the international community to seek widest possible consensus for reforming the UN Security Council (UNSC), instead of endorsing arbitrary changes.

Addressing a meeting of the Intergovernmental Negotiations framework (IGN) in New York, Pakistan’s UN Ambassador Munir Akram said that the IGN process “offers the best avenue” to reach an agreement on the “equitable representation and reform of the Security Council.”

IGN is a group of nation-states working within the United Nations to reform the Council and comprises several international organisations like the African Union, the Arab League, and the Uniting for Consensus (UfC) group. Pakistan is a leading member of the UfC group of nations.

The IGN held the fifth and final meeting of the intergovernmental negotiations on the reforms, which completed the scheduled IGN meetings for the 77th session of the General Assembly.

Suggests reforms for existing imbalances in regional representation

“We agree that your initiatives and the informal-informal exchanges, the interaction with academia have all breathed ‘new life’ in the Security Council reform process,” the Pakistani ambassador said.

“Pakistan believes it is only through patient exchanges, mutual accommodation, and compromise that we can broaden the areas of convergence and reduce the points of divergence,” said Ambassador Akram while explaining Pakistan’s position on the reforms.

Only through this process “(we can) evolve a model for the reform that can be accepted by the widest possible majority of member states” of the United Nations, he added.

Pakistan noted that the revised elements paper of the IGN’s co-chairs, reflected their understanding of the convergences and divergences among member states on the issue of UNSC reforms. “This is a useful modality to reflect our discussions, without compromising the official positions of various groups and states,” he said while opposing the attempt to transform this paper into ‘a basis for negotiations’.

The paper states that the security council could be made more representative such as through enlargement, including better representation for Africa, as well as more systematic arrangements for more voices at the table.

Pakistan has endorsed IGN’s statement on Convergences that the reform of the Security Council is a member states-driven process; the principle of democracy remains important; the IGN should seek solutions that garner the widest political acceptance by member states. “While this does not imply unanimity, it certainly does imply the desire for a consensus … we are seeking the widest possible acceptance which in other words means consensus and this is what we aim for,” Ambassador Akram said.

The Pakistani envoy, however, pointed out that the UfC, which includes Pakistan, “continues to oppose any attempt to attribute positions in the elements paper”.

Mr Akram stated that besides the UfC, and the Arab and the African groups, several other individual member states, including some permanent members of the UNSC, had called for a prior agreement on principles of the reform before proceeding to text-based negotiations.

The IGN paper acknowledged that the expansion of the category of two-year term non-permanent members is accepted by all member states.

While noting this, Ambassador Akram said there’s no convergence on the creation of new permanent members. There’s, however, a possible convergence, on the potential compromise between the proposals for permanent members and for two-year non-permanent seats, which is the option of longer-term or re-electable non-permanent seats as offered by the UfC.

“The reform of the Security Council should redress the existing imbalances in regional representation — adding to the representation of the under-represented regions and reducing, or at least not adding to the representation of the over-represented regions,” said the envoy.

Published in Dawn, May 6th, 2023