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Informal Consultations: a Summary

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By Natalie Reid

 

An informal consultation, simply put, is any gathering of two or more members of the Security Council (or one member and at least one non-member1) that is not a formal public meeting in the Security Council chamber.

Informal consultations are a well-known yet little-publicised fact of procedural life at the United Nations, where the traditional needs of diplomacy have encountered and in some cases encouraged a lack of codification. For there is only one kind of official meeting of the Security Council (a formal and public one), and the most important non-official gathering of the Council – the informal consultation of the whole – is both closed to any non-members and completely off the record.

According to the supporters of the practice of informal consultation, this privacy (which its detractors call ‘secrecy') ensures that the manoeuvring and negotiation required by diplomacy may be achieved away from ‘the glare of public attention'. They argue that the new-found efficiency of the Security Council is enhanced by the informal format in which the overwhelming majority of its meetings take place, and that further moves towards increasing the transparency of informal consultations would only hamper the smooth functioning of the UN's supreme organ.

To its opponents, the informal consultation of the whole is different from the official public meeting in only one regard, and that is not in its lack of institutionalisation. For them, the fact that all the nuts-and-bolts work of the Council is accomplished without the possibility of input by anyone who is not a member of the ‘club', nor the maintenance of a public record, smacks of the secret diplomacy of centuries past. Some of the most resolute critics of the practice come from within the UN system, experienced diplomats - like the permanent representative from Portugal - who believe that a better balance between the need for privacy and the cloak of secrecy can and must be found. Click here for a speech that discusses this topic.

In recent years, efforts to reform the organs and offices of the UN have included much discussion - and a little reform - of the procedure of the Security Council. The proposed agendas for informal consultations of the whole, the meetings that are everything but formal official meetings, are now published daily in the UN Journal, albeit with a separate catch-all category of ‘Other matters'. Since 1995 (and the first British initiative) most SC Presidents will hold briefings on the business of the Council which are open to any Member State of the United Nations. But, as always, there are those who warn that any further move to increase the transparency of the informal consultation of the whole, otherwise known as the ‘formal informal', could result in an extended practice of ‘informal informals', even more secret than those that now exist.

 

1 For a description of almost all the possible combinations and permutations that could be considered to constitute an informal consultation, see Davidson Nicol, 'The United Nations Security Council: Towards Greater Effectiveness', 1982, UNITAR, p. 76.

 

 

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