安保理改革に関する総会討論における石兼大使ステートメント
令和元年11月25日
(As delivered)
Thank you for giving me the floor.Japan aligns itself with the statement delivered by Germany on behalf of the G4. Kindly allow me to add a few words in my national capacity.
Mr. President,
Japan is deeply concerned by the lack of progress on Security Council reform. We approach two decades since we committed “to intensify our efforts to achieve a comprehensive reform of the Security Council in all its aspects” in the Millennium Declaration in 2000. We approach 15 years since we committed to “early reform” of the Council in the 2005 Outcome Document. Yet we are no closer to this goal than we were then. As Prime Minister Abe said in his address here in September, after three quarters of a century since its foundation, structural reform of the UN, including the Security Council, is absolutely imperative. The Council’s membership must be reformed to better reflect the realities of our contemporary world, which means including those among us who have the willingness and capacity to contribute to international peace and security.
Mr. President,
We have to say with regret that, after another year of the IGN, we have not achieved much. The Common African Position now has wider support and is slightly better reflected in the Commonality paper, and we welcome this. But apart from that, there are still many spaces where we can advance.
To ensure this session will be more productive than its predecessors, we have four simple requests, each of which has broad support among the membership.
First, let us start the IGN earlier and have more extended discussions, rather than limiting ourselves to five meetings over just a few months in which we largely rehash well-known positions. We request the President to nominate co-facilitators as soon as possible, so that we can swiftly commence our work. We stand ready to begin in December. We can continue into the summer. Let us use the full calendar.
Second, through this session’s discussion, let us produce a text on which we can negotiate. The two documents that we rolled over from last session are a solid basis on which we can build a text that ensures our work produces tangible results in this session.
Third, in order for us to have a text, we request the Commonality paper have attribution, so that we know who owns which proposal. Furthermore, we request that the “Commonalities” and “Issues for Further Consideration” sections under each of the five clusters be merged, so we can have a clear sense of each proposal and its level of support.
And fourth, let us formalize the IGN process. There are no official records and no webcast of the meetings, so we cannot build on what we have done in the past, and we instead reinvent the wheel each year. The IGN should be a normal process within the General Assembly and should be guided by its rules and procedures. Let us discuss how to make this process more open, transparent and formal.
Mr. President,
Let me reiterate one more time our longstanding position; text-based negotiations are how we deliberate at the United Nations and how we resolve and bridge our differences. It is high time that we treated the issue of Security Council reform the way we do every other issue here. The “Intergovernmental Negotiations” we have been doing are not negotiations, but rather a mere repetition of the same statements. Let us start true negotiations in this session.
A small minority of states would insist that we need to achieve consensus before negotiations begin, but if we demanded consensus as a precondition to negotiations, we would never agree on anything.
Mr. President,
Please rest assured that you have our full support throughout this session as well the co-facilitators once they are nominated. But time is of the essence, and we must demonstrate to the world that we are capable of completing the task before us.
Thank you.