Statement by Ambassador Asoke Kumar Mukerji, Permanent Representative, at the United Nations General Assembly Plenary meeting on the Annual Report of the UN Security Council, on November 12, 2015

Mr. President,

 Let me at the outset thank you for organizing this meeting to consider the Annual Report A/70/2 of the UN Security Council for the period 2014 to 31 July 2015. I would like to appreciate the efforts put in by Ambassador Gerard Bohemen, PR of New Zealand and his team in preparing the Annual Report of the Security Council. I would also like to thank Ambassador Matthew Rycroft, PR of the United Kingdom for presenting the report to the General Assembly.

2. Last year, my delegation had proposed that the issues raised by member states in this annual meeting to consider the Security Council's report should be followed up, so that the Council can respond to this debate. Several other delegations had also made this proposal. While paragraph 216 of the Report before us today indicates that the President of the Council provided Council members with a summary of the Assembly's consideration of the annual report, that seems to have been the end of the matter as far as the Council is concerned.

Mr President,

3. This attitude of the Council is highly objectionable. We expect the Council to take into account the views expressed by us in this annual exercise. In case the Council feels our views are not relevant, we expect to be informed of the reasons why this is so. Otherwise, we are discussing the annual report of the Council without any reason, and the valuable time and resources of the General Assembly are being wasted in the process.

4. We note in paragraph 1 of the report that the Council held 267 formal meetings, of which 248 were public. It also adopted 65 resolutions and 27 presidential statements. The question that we pose today is in how many of the open debates, where member states participated, did the Council adopt its outcome documents, whether resolutions or presidential statements, after the participation of non-Council member states? The answer is quite clear: none.

5. All the resolutions and presidential statements were adopted by the Council at its open debates before member states not represented in the Council took the floor, making a travesty of such open participation. Of late, this attitude towards other member states has become even more worrying. At a recent open debate of the Council, we were shocked to note that plenipotentiary accredited envoys of member states were given the opportunity to speak only after non-plenipotentiary representatives of non-member state delegations.

6. The Council's report gives impressive statistics, but these statistics only cloak the Council's imperviousness to adapt its working procedures to the contemporary world, which require it to meet the standards of transparency and accountability and be responsive to views of other member states. That is the nub of the problem.

Mr President,

7. The Council's report, being opaque and unaccountable, is therefore a half-way house. We read its 264 pages without really understanding why the primary organ of the United Nations responsible for maintaining international peace and security has allowed the world to slide further down the road to violence and conflict. Why have more than 60 million people become the victims of this crisis? Why is the world seeing so many refugees from crisis situations? We in the General Assembly do not receive any answers to this question. Nor, for that matter, does the general public. The consequence is a severe erosion of the credibility of the Council itself.

8. I would like to focus on three major areas of the Council's work, as contained in its annual report, to offer some comments. I do so to highlight that the ineffectiveness of the Council is imposing severe costs on all of us, especially developing countries. Going by its report, the Council seems unable to comprehend the nature of the socio-economic challenges faced by developing countries due to the breakdown of international peace and security, especially now when we are on the cusp of implementing Agenda 2030 adopted unanimously with the goal of eradicating poverty within a generation. This is due to the fact that for the past 70 years, only one developing country is represented as a permanent member in the Council, while our total membership in this Assembly is more than 134. We call for the urgent expansion of the Council, in order to add more developing country members in both its categories, to offset this problem.

9. These three areas are the Council's use of United Nations peacekeeping, the response of the Council to terrorism, and the inability of the Council to discharge its primary task, set by the UN Charter, to resolve disputes peacefully.

 Mr. President,

10. With regard to UN peacekeeping, the Annual Report states that much of the Council's activity focused on Africa. Yet, none of the peacekeeping missions mandated by the Council to operate in Africa have been successfully ended. Going by its routine roll over of mandates of peacekeeping missions, the Council is using peacekeeping as an open-ended mechanism, and not as a means to bring about a sustainable peace, as recommended most recently by the HIPPO Report.

11. This brings into focus the fact that the Council has not been able to use peacekeeping as a tool to secure the peace. For peacekeeping in general, the Council continues to flout Article 44 of the Charter by not inviting member states contributing troops, who are not represented in the Council, to participate in decisions on how mandates for peacekeeping are drawn up. We call on the Council to immediately implement Article 44 of the Charter in letter and spirit to make UN peacekeeping effective and cost-efficient.

12. As far as crises in Africa are concerned, this is most probably due to the fact that no permanent member of the Council, which exercises the right of being a drafter of these mandates (or 'pen-holder') is from Africa. This is a major shortcoming as seen from the report of the Council, which only expanding the membership of the Council in both categories can rectify. Mere increase in short-, or for that matter long-, term rotational seats is not the answer, in the real world, to the glaring shortcomings of pen-holdership.

Mr. President,

13. The response of the Council to the threat posed by terrorism, especially in Africa and Asia, has been less than robust. In paragraph 49, we see the Council's noting the growing terrorist threat which affects neighbouring countries and beyond. In paragraph 51 the Council calls for the terrorist threat to be addressed. The same pattern is evident in reading paragraphs 121 and 127. In addition to the landmark Council Resolutions against terrorism like 1267, 1373, and 1540, we note the reference in the report to new Resolutions such as 2195, 2170, 2178, 2199. Despite all its exhortations and Resolutions, the report is silent on what actually the Council has done in terms of acting to meet this threat. The increasing number and brutality of terrorist acts meanwhile vividly illustrates the ineffectiveness of the Council to counter terrorism.

14. Last year, my delegation had pointed to the need for the Council to investigate, prosecute and penalize terrorist acts, especially those directed against UN peacekeepers. Regrettably, the Council has not acted on this issue, and paragraphs 134 to 140 make for dismal reading regarding the ineffectiveness of the Council in this regard.

15. The report does not reveal anything about the way in which the Council's sanctions regimes against terrorism function, which by itself is a significant omission, hidden from our scrutiny in this Assembly.

Mr President,

16. The third area where the Council's report glosses over its ineffectiveness is in the pursuit of peaceful negotiations to resolve disputes. For example, the impetus to use political negotiations to resolve crises is now occurring outside the Security Council and not in the Council. The Council has watched these negotiations from the sidelines, whether they concerned the crisis in Syria, South Sudan and Ukraine. We note that these negotiations were conducted by member states, not all of which were represented on the Council. This is a telling comment on how the Council is today not the primary driver of the political process to resolve disputes, which is its core competence under the Charter. Such a trend again illustrates why our leaders, in their wisdom, unanimously agreed ten years ago that the Council, through early reforms, needs to become more representative in order to be more effective.

 Mr President,

 17. Against this broad backdrop, we note with concern the information in the report that the Council, instead of focusing on its primary responsibility to maintain international peace and security, is instead venturing into areas which are in the domain of the General Assembly. Paragraphs 98 to 100 illustrate this appropriately, especially when we recall that it has been the General Assembly which has successfully galvanized the international response to the Ebola crisis through the Ebola Trust Fund, to which my country was a major financial contributor.

18. To conclude, Mr President, the report illustrates very vividly that the Council's effectiveness in maintaining international peace and security, which is the reason the Council was set up by the Charter, is today severely undermined. The solution, from us in the General Assembly, is to effect early reforms of the Council, as mandated by all our leaders at the World Summit of 2005. We are hopeful that our discussion today, Mr President, will strengthen your resolve to implement that mandate during your Presidency, so that we are able to set right this major anomaly in international relations by the time we conclude the commemoration of the 70th anniversary of our United Nations in September 2016.

 I thank you.