H.E. Mr. Hennadiy Udovenko
Excerpts on Security Council Reform
September 8, 1998
What is particularly regrettable is that these delays concern not only the long-term proposals, but also Secretary-General's recommendations on vital and urgent measures in the administrative and budgetary fields. Some, perhaps, may argue that the delays were inevitable because the issues before the General Assembly had been either too complicated or utterly confusing, and a period of time was too short to resolve them. I believe, however, that that would be a weak excuse, neglecting the fact that any substantial progress toward meaningful decisions was thwarted by mistrust and suspicion that continued to exist among the Member States, as well as by our inability to move beyond narrow positions of delegations and groupings in an effort to reach a common goal. This has been one of my big disappointments that I feel compelled to share with you.
Future deliberations on reform issues will serve as a litmus test of the political will of the membership to go ahead with genuine renewal of the Organization and an indication of Member States' readiness to seek mutually acceptable compromises in the true spirit of consensus that had emerged in the course of the main part of the fifty-second session.
The same fully applies to the work of the Open-ended Working Group on the Reform of the Security Council.
It has been rightly said that any reform of the United Nations will be incomplete without the reform of its main organ responsible for the maintenance of international peace and security -- the Security Council. Only in the course of the general debate at this session, almost 160 speakers, including many Heads of State and Government, raised that issue in their statements. But once again, for all the eloquent appeals for change, we can report no visible movement from words to deeds. After 65 lengthy meetings held by the Working Group over the course of the session, the body charged with the task of preparing a blueprint for transforming the Council was once again unable to submit any agreed recommendations on any of the substantive issues related to Security Council reform.
While progress has been made in some areas, a number of major stumbling blocks prevented the Group from fulfilling its mandate. Among the most intractable ones is the problem of finding a magic number that would increase the representative character of the Council without impairing its efficiency. Beyond the question of the total size of an enlarged Council, controversy is still brewing around the creation of new permanent seats and rotational arrangements to fill those seats, and, of course, the highly-charged problem of the veto right with respect to both current and prospective permanent members.
Given the fundamental nature of these differences, reform of the Security Council is probably one of the most difficult issues faced by the United Nations in its history. Obviously, this resolution requires much more than negotiating skills, or, for that matter, magician's sleight-of-hand. It will take political will and courage on the part of sovereign states to move ahead to a renewed Security Council that can better reflect the realities of the new century and more effectively serve the entire international community.
