UNITED NATIONS: Eminent intellectuals and leading civil society advocates who closely work with the United Nations are demanding that any move to reform the Security Council must include the emerging powers from the global South.

And that long-discussed change must not be thwarted by arguments that southern governments are undemocratic and would not truly represent their citizens, they add.

“There’s nothing that convinces the global South to be outside the big table,” Kingsley Moghalu, head of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, told a gathering of more than 300 NGO leaders on Wednesday.

Moghalu, a former UN spokesman for the International Tribunal for Rwanda, believes that seating large southern nations around the Council table would enhance the credibility of the body, the senior decision-making organ of the United Nations responsible for maintaining peace and security in the world.

Early this week, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan made a strong case for reshaping the world body’s system, including increasing the permanent and non-permanent membership of the Security Council, but he did not say if the expansion would aim to include some of the world’s poor nations.

“We are an organization of sovereign states,” Annan told a news conference, “but the structure of the Council has not changed. It is about time that we took the reform seriously.”

The Security Council has no permanent representation from Africa and Latin America while Asia is only represented by China. Potential candidates from the developed world include India, Indonesia, Brazil and South Africa.—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.