United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said this Saturday that Security Council reform with African enlargement could stop being a “joke” and move on to a “serious discussion”.
“I would say that for the first time it will be possible to seriously discuss this reform, because so far the discussion has been a joke, to be completely honest. Because there was no base document for discussion and there was no discussion report. That is, every year the commission was sworn in, the commission worked for a year, for this commission there was nothing “input” and there was nothing “output” that this commission could give,” António Guterres analyzed.
The Secretary-General of the United Nations answered a question during a public event “Prime Ministerial Series” with Prime Minister Ulisses Correia and Silva in Mindelo, Sao Vicente Island, where he is visiting.
“If you had asked me this question a year ago, I would have clearly said no. When you ask it now, something strange happened at the last General Assembly of the United Nations,” he began by pointing out when asked about the possibility of reforming the Security Council during his tenure.
He recalled that at that General Assembly, US President Joe Biden was “open to the presence of permanent members of the Council from Africa” and from Latin America, and that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said he would welcome the entry of Brazil and India to the Security Council.
“The United States and Russia or the Russian Federation are undoubtedly the two fundamental parts that make any reform possible (…) Now I believe that there are conditions for the commission dealing with the reform of the Security Council to be able to effectively start a discussion in earnest. Will this discussion lead to any result or not? It’s too early to say, because we all know the difficulties,” he admitted.
The difficulties, he said, are caused by five countries that are permanent members of the Security Council with veto power (China, the US, Russia, France and the UK) and “relationships, among other states, in choosing who represents other regions.”
“And we know that this problem also exists. Therefore, I do not want to give false hopes. But there will be a serious discussion for the first time,” he admitted.
António Guterres started this Saturday a three-day visit to Cape Verde as part of the Ocean Race, the largest regatta in the world, which makes a stop on the island of Sao Vicente Cape Verde from January 20 to 25, participating on Monday, also in Mindelo, at the Ocean Summit .