UNITED NATIONS, June 17: The G-4 plan to expand the UN Security Council has received a major setback, following Washington’s statement on Thursday that it wanted the Council expanded by two “or so” permanent members and two or three non-permanent ones, about half the number of those proposed by the four nations.
The envoys from Japan, Germany, India and Brazil met at the German mission to the United Nations to assess the situation following the US statement.
When asked to comment on the US position as enunciated by the US Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, the Brazilian ambassador Ronaldo Mota Sardenberg Said: “We still are waiting to see the US proposals on paper.”
Mr Sardenberg noted that although US took its time in taking a position on the UN reforms package, “…but we want concrete written document on the US position.”
The US position, the diplomats said, has hurt Germany’s bid for the permanent seat which essentially eliminates American support for Bonn. The G-4 plan proposed by Germany, Japan, Brazil and India and would add 10 seats — six permanent ones, including two from Africa — and four non-permanent ones. Their resolution would delay veto rights for new members for 15 years.
The plan submitted by Consensus Group led by Pakistan and Italy stipulates an addition of 10 permanent seats in the 15-member Security Council. That proposal may come to a vote soon and achieve a majority but not the required two-thirds majority, diplomats said.
Mr Burns said enlargement of the Council could wait and not take up debating time over the next three months when UN members are considering Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s wider reform plans. “We see this debate as only one of the issues that has to be put forward. And we’d like to see progress on all the other issues before we turn our full attention to the UN Security Council debate itself,” he said.
At the United Nations, acting US ambassador Anne Patterson told reporters: “I question whether we would accept Security Council reform before we had a package of reforms that was acceptable to the United States and to our Congress.”
JAPAN: In a relative development, the Japanese papers reported that the United States has told Japan to consider options to reform the Council other than its bid with Brazil, Germany and India for a permanent seat on the body. The Japanese papers reported that the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told the Japanese Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura in a phone call on Friday not to submit this month a resolution drafted by the four nations, known as the G4. “If the resolution is submitted in haste, we would have to oppose to it,” Ms Rice was quoted as saying by a senior foreign ministry official in the English-language Japan Times. A US embassy spokesman called the accounts of Friday’s telephone conversation “a little bit of a stretch.”
He said Ms Rice told Machimura that the “G4 is one group” pushing for reform and that it did not have the only proposal or timetable for change.
