NEW YORK, 14 DECEMBER – The Permanent Representative of Italy to the UN, Maurizio Massari, addressed today a Security Council debate on the reform of multilateralism and maintenance of peace and international security.
“There is an increasing demand to reform and strengthen the set of multilateral institutions on which the international system relies today. We firmly believe in an international order based on rules, with the United Nations at its core, in order to guarantee peace and security, human rights and sustainable development. As declared in the Agenda 2030, there is no peace without sustainable development, nor sustainable development without peace or human rights. It is therefore essential to anchor the New Agenda for Peace, launched in 2021 by Secretary General Antonio Guterres in the context of the ‘Our Common Agenda’ report and currently in the process of editing, to these principles”, said the Ambassador.
The Security Council is the global institution in charge of maintaining international peace and security. Italy thinks that its reform is urgent and important in order to strengthen multilateralism. Italy and its partners of the group Uniting for Consensus “have a very clear opinion on how to reach this goal”.
According to the UfC group, a satisfying reform of the Security Council is one that makes it “more representative, democratic, efficient, transparent and responsible. In short, more suitable to deal with the new global challenges of the current period”, added the Italian Ambassador.
More transparent “means that decisions are not taken inside a small and exclusive group possessing the power of a definitive resolution, but by all the members in a more inclusive manner”. More representative means going beyond a mere enlargement of the number of the Council members, focusing instead on increasing the chance for all of the Members States to improve their role and raise the voice of those that are currently underrepresented, in particular African and Small Island Developing States (SIDS).
More responsible, according to the UfC, means that each member must answer to the entire community of the United Nations. The vetoes casted in relation to the Russian aggression of Ukraine gave further confirmation of the paralyzing effect of this instrument on the power of action of the Council. For this reason, the UfC supports initiatives which aim to self-limit the exercise of veto power.
More democratic, still according to the proposal of the Group endorsed by Italy, means simply that each new member of the reform Security Council must be elected: “Democracy, as we know it, is based on regular elections”, said Massari. Lastly, more efficient means a Council capable of acting rapidly, possessing more accountability in the eyes of all Member States and whose decisions are fully respected and applied, making it able to better fulfill its mandate.
“A reformed Security Council is at hand. It is not the absence of a text that is hindering progresses towards a more efficient Security Council. Unfortunately, however, the debate is currently wrongly shaped on the process and on procedural questions rather than on the substance and on the quest for a true agreement on fundamental issues, such as regional representation inside the Council”, said the Italian Ambassador stressing that Italy will keep on being constructively committed to a new negotiating session of the IGN (the discussing platform for the reform attended by all of the UN membership) which will start next January, hoping that the rest of the members will do the same. (@OnuItalia)