May 07 ,2019
Germany, Brazil and Japan are “absolutely needed” as permanent members of a reformed and enlarged UN Security Council to better reflect contemporary realities: FranceIndia has been campaigning for a reformed UN Security Council that reflects the realities of the 21st century
New Delhi: After backing India’s case to list Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed Chief Masood Azhar as a terrorist under the UN, France has once again backed India and some other countries for membership of an enlarged UN Security Council.
Countries like India, Germany, Brazil and Japan are “absolutely needed” as permanent members of a reformed and enlarged UN Security Council to better reflect contemporary realities and the addition of these key members to the UN high-table is among France’s “strategic” priorities, French envoy to the UN said last week, according to PTI.
“In terms of policy, France and Germany have strong policy which is to work together to enlarge the Security Council and to succeed in terms of the negotiations that should lead to the enlargement of the Security Council that we consider absolutely needed to better reflect the world as it is. There is no question about it,” France’s Permanent Representative to the UN Francois Delattre told reporters at the UN.
Speaking alongside German envoy to the UN, Christoph Heusgen, at the end of Germany’s Presidency of the Council for April, Delattre emphasised that France considered that “Germany, Japan, India, Brazil and a fair representation of Africa in particular are absolutely needed at the table to get towards a fairer representation of the Security Council. This is for us a matter of priority.”
He underlined that Paris believes the enlargement of the Security Council with the addition of a few key members is “one of our strategic priorities.”
Noting the launch of French-German alliance for multilateralism, he said it signifies that the two nations strongly believe in the UN as the core of today’s global governance and that they strongly believe in “multilateralism and means that we are actively working to reform and in some respects to refound, reinvent multilateralism so that it is really efficient for the decades to come.”
France’s support for India’s permanent presence in an enlarged UN Security Council is not new but the most recent assertion comes in the wake of France piloting a proposal — backed by the US and UK — at the UN’s 1267 Sanctions Committee to ban Masood
Azhar as a terrorist under UN norms. Azhar was finally declared a terrorist under UN listed rules on 1 May.
India has been actively campaigning for a reformed UN Security Council that reflects the realities of the 21st century.
India’s Permanent Representative to the UN Ambassador Syed Akbaruddin, speaking at the informal meeting of the Plenary on the Intergovernmental negotiations on the question of equitable representation on and increase in the membership of the Security Council earlier this year, had said that on the issue of ‘Categories of Membership”, a total of 113 Member states, out of 122 who submitted their positions in the Framework Document, support expansion in both of the existing categories specified in the Charter.
“In short, more than 90% of the written submissions in the document are in favour of expansion in both categories of membership specified in the Charter,” he had said.
Source : Livemint
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