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Brazil, Germany, India and Japan have drafted a proposal for a reformed UN Security Council. The proposed plan would raise the current number of seats from 15 to 25. All four countries signing the proposal want to take a permanent seat on the council alongside France, the UK, US, Russia and China.
The draft makes provision for this, since it also calls for an extra six permanent seats, as well as four rotating ones, although no mention is made of precisely which countries should sit in those extra places. If it looks certain that they will gain the support of two-thirds of the 191 UN member states, then they intend to present the draft resolution to the General Assembly.
Waive the right to veto
However, Washington has already said it won’t support the four countries’ bids for seats, unless each of them waives the right to the power of veto. China, meanwhile, has voiced discontent with the proposed reforms stating that, with so many countries holding different opinions on how to reform the Security Council, proposals such as this one will only exacerbate those differences.
Dick Leurdijk from Hague-based research body the Clingendael Institute, commented that the matter of Security Council reform often results in a game of political ping-pong:
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| Click to listen to Robert Chesal's interview with Dick Leurdijk | |
| UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan suggested two possibilities for reform earlier in the year: one was adding six new permanent seats to the Security Council, the other is adding a third tier of semi-permanent seats. Neither of the proposals offers veto-power. Mr Annan said he wants a decision to be made by the time the United Nations holds its summit in September. |
He says this is because countries “have the feeling that as soon as one of the regional partners becomes a new member of the Security Council, that’s to their own disadvantage. They – Italy, Japan, Argentina and others – are also very much interested in becoming members of the Security Council, because that gives them a different status regionally and internationally.”
One of the arguments in support of Japan and Germany in particular gaining permanent seats is that these countries make considerable contributions to the UN’s budget. Mr Leurdijk thinks this is a significant – but not overriding – factor. For him, the changing political landscape must be taken into account:
“It is relevant […] but it’s not the most dominant factor […] The most important factor is that we are now in a world which is completely different from the world of 60 years ago when the United Nations was established.”
Buying seats on the Security Council
Nor does he believe that there’s credence to the argument sometimes put forward that a country can ‘buy’ its place on the Security Council by means of those contributions:
“That’s not the main argument - there are other elements involved, for instance, the question of how many troops you are willing to provide for UN peace-keeping operations; contributions to the UN peace-keeping budget; the number of inhabitants; contribution to the UN assessed budget. You have a number of different options that should be taken into account.”
| China opposes a permanent Japanese place on the Security Council for what it views as Japan’s failure to admit to atrocities committed during its 1931-45 occupation of China. Tens of millions of Chinese people lost their lives in this period. |
A further reform suggested by this draft proposal is that African countries should gain two of the new permanent and one of the non-permanent seats. But Mr Leurdijk points out the anomaly of the situation: “This is the curious thing about the four countries that have now combined their forces - Japan, Germany, India and Brazil - [their group] leaves Africa out. For the sake of the credibility the UN I think it is absolutely important that Africa should also be included in the extension of the Security Council [seats]”