Foreign minister S Jaishankar has called again for reform in the United Nations, saying the global body has become irrelevant in many cases. And many feel the UN Security Council does not represent global interest any longer, he added, making it clear that there was a caveat.
Speaking at the Kautilya Economic Conclave, the foreign minister again flagged his concern about the UN.
“Where the UN is concerned, I think it’s obvious to everybody by now that the UN is gridlocked. That if you look at the big issues of the day, whether you look at the conflict in the Gulf, whether you look at the conflict in Ukraine, whether you look at other issues in Africa, whether you look at COVID, actually, the United Nations has been largely irrelevant to the decision-making,” he had said.
About the UN Security Council, he said, there is a “widely held view that a lot of it is because the Security Council is gridlocked and that the Security Council no longer represents the entirety of the global interest”.
The UN, he recalled, started with 51 members and now has grown almost four times.
“If you have grown four times and you want to keep the old board of management, it is not going to work. It is common sense,” he said.
But the trouble is that there are a few players who are resistant to the reform of UN, Jaishankar said, without naming any names.
They, he said, are “using the name of Africa” to block the reform of UN. But the “irony” is that Africa “actually now has a clear position”.
Africa, he said, has come to the intergovernmental negotiations and indicated what they would like to see. They have laid out their position.
“So, I think we need to see whether, you know, we will continue to watch, in a sense, the irrelevance or the, I would say, ineffectiveness-is a better word-of the UN. And it is an important question because we need the UN. The UN has done a big service to the international community. Our job must be to fix the UN, not to work around the UN. But the UN itself has to help with that process,” he added.
Jaishankar had earlier criticised the current status of the UN as well, saying what is needed is a “better UN”. “We don’t need no UN… The idea is not to throw away the UN, but to fix the UN,” he had said.
