Briefing Document to the National Assembly on Foreign Affairs on the UN reform

BRIEFING DOCUMENT TO THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS ON THE UN REFORM

Prepared by the Africa Institute of South Africa (AISA)

Cape Town, 26 August 2005

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

1. The importance of the reform agenda of the United Nations (UN) and other global institutions cannot be overemphasized. It comes at a critical time for Africa’s special needs and development agenda. The timing is historic. However the reforms can benefit Africa or the continent can lose out depending on how these reforms are approached and implemented. African leaders and countries have adopted home grown initiatives such as the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) to renew Africa’s potential and strengthen its position in the global economy.

2. The international community has come on board with a plethora of initiatives seeking to address Africa’s developmental challenges. However, it is the UN reform that has drawn wider attention. The UN Secretary General’s Report titled; In Larger Freedom: Towards Development, Security and Human Rights for All (2004) puts forward a reform package for consideration at the upcoming September UN Millennium Summit.

3. The suggested reforms are three-fold; institutional, doctrinal, and injecting new energy into existing international engagements. The institutional reforms include the expansion of the Security Council, the strengthening of the General Assembly, the transformation of the Human Rights Commission into a Council; the establishment of a Peace Building Commission; the creation of a Democracy Fund; and improving the effectiveness of the Secretariat. The doctrinal reforms advance a new paradigm that recognizes an intricate link between development, security and human rights. The reform package also put forward a set of deliverables aimed at making a number of international engagements (for example, on environment, trade and Aid) a reality.

4 The African Union has played an active role in all these developments, adopting common positions, declaring commitments and engaging extensively with relevant stakeholders in the run up to the September Summit on both institutional and doctrinal reforms. The highlight of these developments is a shift by the AU from the 1997 OAU Harare Declaration position that proposed a rotational model for the Security Council enlargement. The current AU position, the Ezulwini Consensus, is based on a permanent membership model with the right to a veto.

5. But the AU’s Ezulwini is not the only position on the table. The G.4 (India, Brazil, Japan and German) and the ‘United for Consensus’ group have their own respective positions which have even been developed into draft resolutions for consideration by the General Assembly. Of the two latter positions, the G4’s is the closest to that of the AU.

6. The Africa Institute of South Africa (AISA) supports the reform package as put forward in the SG’s report. To that end, we initiated and participated in a number of activities in order to support the reform process, which in our view is in the interest of Africa. We have interrogated various documents related to the reforms and our conclusions are as follows;

We support the principle of developing a common African approach to global issues, including the UN reforms. We believe that the unity of Africa is one factor that has strengthened Africa’s position in the UN system.

We believe that the preoccupation with the reform and expansion of UN Security Council should not be at the expense of the broader institutional and doctrinal reforms, because we may lose one for the other or lose on both.

We also believe that because of the nature of the UNSC enlargement proposal, the AU position should have been crafted in a way that would make it possible for interested and capable African countries to adopt individual positions without having to be seen as breaking ranks or dividing the AU.

We are convinced that the AU position has not clearly defined the criteria for selecting African members to the UNSC. In this belief we propose a criteria building on what the High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Changes had suggested.

We strongly believe that the criteria should include the following;

a) the capacity to represent Africa and discharge Africa’s responsibilities’ effectively in the UN system;

b) the capacity to contribute to the promotion of peace, security and stability, as well as development, in Africa;

have strong democratic credentials;

have reasonable level of political stability and stable state institutions;

demonstrated commitment to Pan-African ideals and support of the programmes of the AU;

command respect and recognition on the African continent and globally;

demonstrated commitment to the payment of assessed contributions to both the AU and UN.

If applied properly and impartially, these criteria could enable the AU to create a framework for interested countries to compete, openly, for the two seats. No doubt, Nigeria, South Africa and Egypt are the front-runners. Our "advantage matrix’ gives us two scenarios. In the first scenario, Egypt is a strong and guaranteed case because many influential players in the UN and the North in particular see it as a country that could bring into the Security Council one constituency that in today’s "war on terror" should not be marginalized – i.e. the Arab/ Middle East. In this scenario, competition is between Nigeria and South Africa. In the second scenario, South Africa is regarded as a definite case because of its political and economic weight on the continent. Accordingly, in this scenario, competition is between Nigeria and Egypt. So, it would seem, if this "advantage matrix" is anything to go by, that Nigeria is the weakest of the three candidates.

Notwithstanding the importance of winning the battle on the veto issue, we believe that the AU’s intransigent demand on the matter could cost the world progress on the enlargement of the UNSC. We believe that the AU position was a strategic error. Deferring the veto issue could put Africa in a better bargaining position with the G.4 The ‘all or nothing approach’ is not in the interest of Africa.

Rather, the AU could opt for a three-step approach to the veto issue. Step 1 could focus on securing a deal on the reforms and the Security Council enlargement in particular; in Step 2, now with African representation on the Security Council, the strategy could now focus on restraining the use of the veto by those who wield it; and Step 3 could works towards the scrapping the veto or extending it to permanent members who do not have it.

Instead of hardlining on the veto, the AU should throw its weight behind the reform

package in its totality, because if the September Summit were to fail, Africa will be the biggest loser. The UN is important to Africa as a forum to advance our international agenda which is focused on the following issues: development, peace and security, debt cancellation, trade, the transformation of the Bretton Woods institutions, democratising the global governance, and building a global front against US unilateralism and militarism. The fact that the 2000 UN Millennium Declaration and the proposed Outcome Document for the September Summit both have a section dedicated to Africa’s specials needs, should indicate to us that the UN to us is more than the two seats on the Security Council.