PM pitches strongly for UNSC reforms

Prime Minister Narendra Modi continued his strong pitch for the inclusion of India in the United Nations Security Council on Saturday. He was addressing a meeting of leaders of the G4 countries — Brazil, Germany, India and Japan — that support each other’s efforts for permanent seats on an expanded security council.

“The UNSC must include the world’s largest democracies (that are) major locomotives of the global economy, and voices from all the major continents,” Modi said. “The reform of the security council, within a fixed time frame, has become an urgent and important task,” he added.

This was the first meeting of the countries’ leaders since <g data-gr-id="44">2004,</g> when the G4 was formed. Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel and Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe were present at the meeting hosted by PM Modi. The four countries came together in 2004 bound by a “shared commitment to global peace,” Modi said. Japan’s Abe said the G4 meeting is a “golden opportunity” and added that there was a “mounting momentum for change” and that “voices of great nations should be heard.”

He further added: “We live in a fundamentally different world from when the UN was born, faced with complex and undefined challenges.” With trends in demography and migrations posing new challenges, and with climate change and terrorism becoming new and major concerns, a reformed security council is the need of the hour to ensure world peace and the security of its peoples.

Modi said the UN reflects a century which “we left behind” and not the century “we live in” as challenges and threats are different now. Currently, the five permanent members of the Security Council are China, France, the Russian federation, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Germany’s Merkel said the G4 was not any “exclusive group” and it believes in taking others along in its pursuit of ensuring reform of the UNSC. “It makes it incumbent on the UN to reform, of the UNSC to better reflect the distribution of powers. We need to be prudent and talk to the others to change the format of the UNSC,” she said. “Our lives are becoming globalized. However, fault lines among our identities are growing,” the Prime Minister said, underscoring again that the world today is a lot different from the one in which the security council was first formed.

In a joint statement, the G4 leaders stressed that a more representative, legitimate and effective security council is needed more than ever to address the spiralling global conflicts and crises of recent years. They said they that a security council that reflects the realities of the international community in the 21st century — where more <g data-gr-id="61">member states</g> are able and willing to maintain international peace and security — has to be the way forward.