UNITED NATIONS: Reaffirming its commitment to work towards a “consensual pathway” for restructuring the UN Security Council, Pakistan said Tuesday that adding more permanent seats will compound the dysfunctionalities of the 15-member body and not resolve them.
Speaking in the Inter-Governmental Negotiations (IGN) debate on Security Council reform, Pakistan’s Ambassador to the UN, Dr Maleeha Lodhi said that the advocates of permanent seats claim to address inherent dysfunctionalities of the Council but their proposal means more of the same.
This will, in fact, she added, compound dysfunctionalities, by embracing anachronism, inefficiency and potential paralysis that has already deadlocked the working of the Council.
“It undermines the democratic and representative nature of the reform process; it denies the larger membership their democratic right to hold Council members to account.
Known as the Group of Four–India, Brazil, Germany and Japan– have shown no flexibility in their campaign for expanding the Security Council by 10 seats, with 6 additional permanent and four non-permanent members.
On the other hand, Italy/Pakistan-led Uniting for Consensus (UfC) group say that additional permanent members will not make the Security Council more effective and also undermine the democratic principle.
