Palestinian crisis presents opportunity to reform UN, says South African foreign minister Pandor

Johannesburg: The Palestinian crisis has presented an opportunity to reform the UN, to make it more representative and effective at the Security Council level, and to protect the innocent from harm in future conflicts, South African foreign minister Naledi Pandor has said.

Speaking as the chief guest at an Eid gathering organised at Brixton on Thursday, Pandor, the minister of International Relations and Cooperation, criticised the Israeli incursions into Gaza as “arrogant breaches of international law by Israel and the allies of Israel. She said that a new “low point” has been reached with respect for human rights.

“The war, as well as the genocidal intent of Israel and the failure of the UN to stop the murder of thousands of Palestinians and to show respect for international humanitarian law, indicated to all of us that the world had reached a new low point in respect for justice and human rights,” she said.

Pandor said the Palestinian crisis has also presented an opportunity to reform the UN - to make it more representative and effective at the Security Council level. “(We need to) empower it with practical capacity to protect the innocent from harm in any future conflicts,” she said. “The reason for establishing the UN was to ensure that as the globe, we would settle all conflicts in that body and should any violence ensue against innocent people, we made it the duty of the UN Security Council to ensure that the innocent are protected,” she said. “But we have a fundamental flaw in the Security Council - the permanent five who decide what goes and what doesn’t. That has to be changed,” the minister said.

“We also have a flaw in that despite the mandate for peace and security, when the people of Palestine were suffering the onslaught and continue to suffer it, we had no enforcement capability in the UN,” she said.Kim travelled to Russia in September for a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The US, South Korea and others accuse North Korea of supplying conventional weapons for Russia’s war in Ukraine in return for advanced weapons technologies and other support. China has refused to criticize the Russian invasion and accused the US and NATO of provoking Moscow, but says it will not provide Moscow with direct military support.