Security Council is anti-democratic

In the past few years the debate on reforming the United Nations has been blowing cold and hot. `Reform' means many things to different peo...

In the past few years the debate on reforming the United Nations has been blowing cold and hot. `Reform’ means many things to different people. For those who seek a permanent membership in the Security Council it is about expanding the Council and permanent membership. For a great majority of Southern nations it means modernising the organisation to play an expanded role in socio-economic spheres, whereas the West would like to have it play a more important military role through the Security Council.However, the searchlight has not yet been focused on the incongruity in the provision of veto power in a Charter that proclaims to be “based on respect for the principle of equal rights”. The structure of the Security Council is glaringly anti-democratic.

The UN Charter that came into force on this day 52 years ago does not provide a rationale for the permanent membership of the five countries in the Security Council. Nor does it justify setting the condition of “concurring votes of the permanent members” with regard to decision making within the Council. The draft of the Charter was prepared by a tiny group — US, UK, France, USSR and China — in 1944. Being the victors in the most genocidal war in human history, it was rather easy for them to have these conditions accepted by the subsequently held United Nations Conference on International Organisations in 1945. This conference was attended by only 50 countries, less than one third of the current membership of the organisation.

The mandate of the Security Council vs. General Assembly is simply a travesty of democracy. A decision of the General Assembly, representing all member states of the organisation, only has the strength of a recommendation.The UN Charter does provide for amendment of its provisions, but that too is subject to the veto power of the permanent members. An amendment could be adopted by a vote of two thirds of the membership of the General Assembly, but it will come into force only if all the permanent members too would ratify it. Thus the permanent members have deeply entrenched their position of hegemony.

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While the industrial world is generally happy with the 1945 status quo, the demand of Germany and Japan for permanent membership (with veto power) puts them in the inconvenience of having to consider amendment to the Charter. It is using this space that countries like South Africa, Egypt, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brazil and Argentina besides India, have embarked on the struggle to find a permanent position, disregarding considerations of what is collectively good for the South. The West is tacitly promoting the claims of all those who care to claim, as that helps divert attention from the need to rectify the anomaly that is the Security Council.

It is a sad testimony to the disarray that the developing world is in that the NAM or the G-77 has not been able to develop a common position on the restructuring of the UN. If the South adopts a collective position and negotiation strategy it is indeed possible to remove the elements of hegemony from the UN Charter. During the protracted negotiations in the preparatory committee for the UN Conference on Environment and Development we successfully sought to introduce the conceptual need for renegotiating those environmental treaties that were concluded without adequate participation of the developing countries. Despite initial Western resistance this statement became an important element of the Agenda 21 programme on International legal instruments and mechanisms. The developing world must seek to extend this consensus statement into the sphere of the UN Charter.

A wealth of independent consensus recommendations on the UN reforms, from various quarters, is already available. Notable among these are the Stockholm Initiative on Global Security and Governance, and the Report of the Commission on Global Governance. However “we the peoples of the United Nations”, the owners of the UN Charter, have a right to be heard on our views on the structure and function of the organisation.

The writer is a consulting ecologist based in Thiruvananthapuram