An ambitious plan to reform the United Nations security council by expanding it from 15 members to 25 looks set to fail next week despite one of the most intense diplomatic lobbying exercises ever conducted, according to UN sources.
The foreign ministers of Germany, Japan, India and Brazil, fighting for a permanent seat each on a new-look council, are to fly to New York at the weekend to try to rescue the plan.
They need to win two-thirds of the votes of the 191-member UN general assembly. But a security council source said the reform was proving difficult to push through.
”It is madness. They [Germany, Japan, India and Brazil] have gone about it completely the wrong way,” he said. ”It is hard to see how it is going to happen.”
The fate of the reform package could be decided at a meeting on Sunday or Monday between the four countries and representatives of the 53 African countries.
The expansion was proposed this year by Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, to reflect today’s reality rather than the situation after the second world war. The reform is also intended to help rebuild the UN’s reputation after criticism of its record in the Balkans, Rwanda and Iraq.
Annan, after a two-day debate at the UN this week, said: ”I think we all have to admit that the council can be more democratic and more representative.
”There is a democracy deficit in the UN governance that has to be corrected.”
His plan is intended to be the centrepiece of a meeting of world leaders at the UN in September, billed as the world summit. Japan, Germany, Brazil and India, who have organised themselves into the ”G4”, have mounted one of the biggest lobbying exercises in history, pushing their embassies to redouble efforts and even recalling retired diplomats with good contacts to help out. They have called in many favours.
The G4 tabled a resolution on Monday, but after two days of debate they found more opposition than they anticipated. The G4 foreign ministers are scheduled to meet on Sunday to decide whether to press ahead.
The security council is dominated by five members with permanent seats and a veto: the US, Britain, France, Russia and China, the second world war victors in 1945. The other 10 are rotated on a two-year basis.
The permanent presence of countries such as Britain and France and the absence of a permanent place for any country from Africa, Latin America or for Japan, the third biggest financial contributor to the UN, has long been seen as unfair by many in the general assembly.
The G4 proposes six permanent seats without veto power and four non-permanent seats. But, according to the security council source, the G4 is being opposed by Argentina and Chile, which want to block Brazil; Italy and, to a lesser extent, Spain, which are reluc tant to endorse Germany; and Pakistan, which is intent on stopping India. The G4 is also being opposed at present by all 53 states from Africa — itself almost enough to prevent the necessary majority.
United States President George Bush, meanwhile, has not forgiven the German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, for his opposition to the Iraq war. Shirin Tahir-Kheli, a US envoy responsible for UN reform, told the general assembly that the US would vote against the resolution. Tahir-Kheli acknowledged that 2005 was not 1945, but said ”security council reform alone will not address the most pressing problems of the organisation”.
Russia and China are also opposed; but Emyr Jones Parry, the British ambassador, while making it clear the British government would not give up its place or its veto, told the general assembly Britain would vote for the G4 resolution.
The African countries on Thursday tabled a resolution of their own proposing a 26-member security council in which Africa would have four places instead of the three proposed by the G4. Gunter Pleuger, Germany’s UN ambassador, still insisted: ”We feel that the votes are there.” But the main hope left for the G4 foreign ministers is to try to reach a compromise with the African countries.
Annan has called a special summit of the UN for September 14 to 16 to discuss reform and progress towards meeting UN goals of halving poverty by 2015. Without the security council reform, he will have lost a large chunk of the agenda. – Guardian Unlimited Â