L’Aquila (Italy), July 10 : Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s intensive lobbying at the G8+G5 meeting for India to get a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council has paid rich dividend by garnering a lot of support from the leaders, including the five permanent members of the Security Council.
The G8+G5 leaders today discussed how to shape up the global governance in the current global situation.
Issues like UN structural reforms, including Security Council, International Labour Organisation, changing the voting share in the World Bank and International Monetary Fund also came up in the meeting.
”It is an expression of will at a gathering of world leaders and taking the matter to the world community. It is a big step forward. Everyone feels that India join the UNSC,” Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon told visiting Indian mediapersons here.
”It is not a place for negotiations,” he pointed out and admitted that New Delhi will still have to do a lot of hard work.
The actual negotiations were taking place from April this year under the aegis of the UN General Assembly.
Even the five permanent members of the Security Council have signed the G5 and G8 Declarations which have expressed their commitment to UN reforms to make it representative of the current political and economic situation, Mr Menon said and expressed the hope that it would be carried out.
The matter came up for discussion at the bilateral meeting that Dr Singh held with his British counterpart Gordon Brown who strongly supported India’s claim for a permanent seat in the Security Council to reflect the present global political and economic realities.
China has also signed the G5 Declaration which had stressed the developing countries’ demand for reforming the UN to make it more representative in respect of the current global realities. However, there has not been any change in Beijing’s policy towards India’s claim for a permanent seat in the Security Council.
Apart from India, many other developing countries like Brazil and Mexico are asking for UN reforms and they had endorsed this view through a Joint Declaration. Some members wanted to have a long list of UN bodies in which they desired restructuring to make it more representative, but India felt that expressing a general intent was significant.
Earlier, in an article at the G8 Meet publication, Dr Singh had strongly advocated the need of UN reforms to make it more representative.
–Agencies