French President Emmanuel Macron at the United Nations on September 25, 2024
| Photo Credit: via Reuters

French President Emmanuel Macron has supported India’s bid for permanent membership in a reformed United Nations Security Council, while advocating the expansion of the powerful U.N. body.

“We have a Security Council that is blocked… Let’s make the U.N. more efficient. We have to make it more representative,” Mr. Macron said at the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Wednesday.

“That’s why,” he said, “France is in favour of the Security Council being expanded. Germany, Japan, India and Brazil should be permanent members, as well as two countries that Africa will decide to represent it.”

India has been at the forefront of efforts at the U.N. to push for urgent long-pending reform of the Security Council, emphasising that it rightly deserves a place at the UN high table as a permanent member. India argues that the 15-nation council founded in 1945 is not fit for purpose in the 21st century and does not reflect contemporary geopolitical realities.

At present, the UNSC comprises five permanent members and 10 non-permanent member countries which are elected for a two-year term by the General Assembly of the United Nations. The five permanent members are Russia, the U.K., China, France and the United States and these countries can veto any substantive resolution.

India last sat at the U.N. high table as a non-permanent member in 2021-22. There has been a growing demand to increase the number of permanent members to reflect the contemporary global reality.

In his address, Mr. Macron also called for a change in the UNSC’s working methods, a limitation of the right of veto in cases of mass crimes, and more attention to operational decisions required for maintaining peace.

“The time has come to regain efficiency in order to act better on the ground,” he said.

Mr. Macron’s remarks came days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his address to the ‘Summit of the Future’ on Sunday emphasised that for global peace and development, reforms in institutions are essential, underlining that reform is the key to relevance.

Addressing the Summit, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also warned the 15-nation UNSC, which he described as “outdated” and whose authority is eroding, will eventually lose all credibility unless its composition and working methods are reformed.

The U.N. chief gave a clarion call: “We can’t build a future for our grandchildren with a system built for our grandparents.”

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres warned world leaders Tuesday (September 24, 2024) that impunity, inequality and uncertainty are creating an “unsustainable world” where a growing number of countries believe they should have a “get out of jail free” card.

“We can’t go on like this,” he said as the General Assembly’s annual debate among presidents, prime ministers, monarchs and other leaders began.

Also read | Reform global institutions for peace and development, Modi tells U.N.

Citing deepening geopolitical divisions, wars with no end in sight, climate change and nuclear and emerging weapons, he said humanity is “edging towards the unimaginable – a powder keg that risks engulfing the world.”

But, he said, “the challenges we face are solvable” if the international community confronts the uncertainty of unmanaged risks, the inequality that underlies injustices and grievances and the impunity that undermines international law and the U.N.‘s founding principles.

“Today, a growing number of governments and others feel entitled to a “get out of jail free’ card,” he said in a reference to the classic board game Monopoly.

The world leaders’ meeting opened under the shadow of increasing global divisions, major wars in Gaza, Ukraine and, Sudan and the threat of an even larger conflict in the wider Middle East.

Mr. Guterres previewed his opening speech at Sunday’s “Summit of the Future,” where he pointed to conflicts from the Middle East to Ukraine and Sudan and to the global security system, which he said is “threatened by geopolitical divides, nuclear posturing, and the development of new weapons and theaters of war.”

He also cited huge inequalities, the lack of an effective global system to respond to emerging and even existential threats, and the devastating impact of climate change.

One notable moment at Tuesday’s opening assembly meeting: U.S. President Joe Biden’s likely final major appearance on the world stage, a platform upon which he has treaded for decades.

U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield told reporters last week that the U.S. focus in the assembly will be on ending “the scourge of war,” lamenting that roughly two billion people live in conflict-affected areas. “The most vulnerable around the world are counting on us to make progress, to make change, to bring about a sense of hope for them,” she said.

Among other speakers on opening day are Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, King Abdullah II of Jordan, and Iran’s new President Masoud Pezeshkian.

The Iranian leader accused Israel on Monday of seeking a wider war in the Middle East and laying “traps” to lead his country into a broader conflict. He pointed to the deadly explosions of pagers, walkie-talkies and other electronic devices in Lebanon last week, which he blamed on Israel, and the assassination of Hamas’ political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on July 31, hours after Pezeshkian’s inauguration.

“We don’t want to fight,” the Iranian president said. “It’s Israel that wants to drag everyone into war and destabilize the region. … They are dragging us to a point where we do not wish to go.” Iran supports both Hamas in Gaza and Lebanon’s Hezbollah militants.

International Rescue Committee President David Miliband recalled that at the San Francisco conference in 1945 where the U.N. was established, then-U.S. President Harry Truman pleaded with delegates to reject the premise that “might makes right” and reverse it to “right makes might,” which was enshrined in the U.N. Charter.

“Almost 80 years later, we have seen the terrible consequences of the failure to flip this equation,” Miliband said. “In contexts like Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine, might is making right.”

Facing mounting global humanitarian needs, unchecked conflict, unmitigated climate change and growing extreme poverty, Miliband challenged world leaders asking: “How will you strengthen, not weaken, the principles of the U.N. Charter for the next 80 years?”

The assembly’s annual meeting, which ends on September 30, followed the two-day Summit of the Future, which adopted a blueprint aimed at bringing the world’s increasing divided nations together to tackle the challenges of the 21st century from conflicts and climate change to artificial intelligence and women’s rights.

The 42-page “Pact for the Future” challenges leaders of the 193 U.N. member nations to turn promises into real actions that make a difference to the lives of the world’s more than 8 billion people.

“We are here to bring multilateralism back from the brink,” Guterres said.

By adopting the pact, leaders unlocked the door, he said. “Now it is our common destiny to walk through it. That demands not just agreement, but action.”

At last year’s U.N. global gathering, Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, took center stage. But as the first anniversary of Hamas’ deadly attack in southern Israel approaches on Oct. 7, the spotlight is certain to be on the war in Gaza and escalating violence across the Israeli-Lebanon border, which is now threatening to spread to the wider Middle East.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is scheduled to speak Thursday morning and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday afternoon.

Zelenskyy will get the spotlight twice. He will speak Tuesday afternoon at a high-level meeting of the U.N. Security Council called by the United States, France, Japan, Malta, South Korea and Britain, whose foreign ministers are expected to attend. He will also address the General Assembly on Wednesday morning.