The Uniting for Consensus (UfC) group that includes Pakistan and China is opposed to the creation of new permanent members in the Security Council. The UfC model entails a Security Council with 26 seats, with an increase only in the non-permanent, elected members.It proposes creating nine new long-term seats with immediate re-election possibilities. Last month, India presented a detailed model on behalf of the G4 nations of Brazil, Germany, Japan and itself for Security Council reform. The G4 model proposes that the Security Council’s membership increase from the current 15 to 25-26, by adding six permanent and four or five non-permanent members.She emphasised that at this stage in the reform process, Member States are not discussing which specific country would occupy the new permanent seats in an expanded and reformed Council. “We are simply discussing a possible framework for the creation of new permanent seats. The subsequent election of these new permanent members would obviously be by a vote of two-thirds of the members of the General Assembly, through a secret ballot, per the rules of procedure of the General Assembly,” she said.Kamboj said that the international community acknowledges the fact that the present structure of the Security Council is not reflective of contemporary realities and that there is an urgent need to reform it.“Expanding only in the non-permanent category will not solve the problem – in fact it will widen the difference between permanent and non-permanent members even more, further entrenching a dispensation that is no longer relevant in the current geo-political context,” she said at the sixth round of the Intergovernmental Negotiations on Security Council reform.Kamboj stressed that it is important to capture the models’ discussion to initiate text-based negotiations within a fixed time frame. India called on the co-chairs of the IGN process to produce a ‘zero draft’ of a negotiating text based on the inputs received from Member States.“We encourage the Co-Chairs not to get distracted by the arguments that call for consensus on all clusters before moving to text-based negotiations. This is a complete inversion of the process followed for all other UN negotiations,” Kamboj said.



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