DM Monitoring
NEW YORK: Pakistan has challenged India’s qualifications for permanent or non-permanent membership of the UN Security Council, saying that New Delhi was in “blatant” violation of the 15-member body’s resolutions aimed at settling the decades-old Kashmir dispute.
Without naming India, which along with three other countries Brazil, Germany and Japan (known as G-4) has been campaigning for a permanent seat in an enlarged Council, Ambassador MunirAkram told the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday that India was now perpetrating a “reign of terror” in a territory occupied with 900,000 troops obviously referring to the deteriorating situation in Jammu and Kashmir.
India, he added, had imposed a complete curfew and lockdown on 8 million people for over a 100 days and it is perpetrating massive violations of human rights against them and against its own minority communities.
It is the first time Pakistan has challenged the India’s eligibility for membership of the Security Council.
“The size and power of a state does not in itself, qualify it for a permanent membership of the Council or other privileges within the United Nations – a United Nations which requires the sovereign equality of all states,” the Pakistani envoy told the 193-member Assembly during a debate on the Security Council reform.
“At least one of the G-4 does not, in our view, qualify for membership of the Security Council, permanent or non-permanent,” Ambassador Akram added.
Full-scale negotiations to reform the Security Council began in the General Assembly in February 2009 on five key areas the categories of membership, the question of veto, regional representation, size of an enlarged Security Council, and working methods of the council and its relationship with the General Assembly. Despite a general agreement on enlarging the Council, as part of the UN reform process, member states remain sharply divided over the details.
The G-4 countries have shown no flexibility in their campaign to expand the Security Council by 10 seats, with six additional permanent and four non-permanent members. On the other hand, the Italy/Pakistan-led Uniting for Consensus (UfC) group firmly opposes any additional permanent members, saying that such a move will not make the Security Council more effective and also undermine the fundamental principle of democracy that is based on periodic elections. The Security Council is currently composed of five permanent members Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States and 10 non-permanent members.
