Is UN Security Council reform coming, and what could it mean?

The Summit of the Future — a high-level meeting which accompanied this year’s 79th U.N. General Assembly, produced “the most concrete progressive agreement on Security Council reform since the 1960s,” according to one of the summit’s key players. Speaking at a Devex event on the sidelines of UNGA, Michèle Griffin, director of the summit, described how it aimed to find common ground between countries on a broad range of issues. A document summarizing many of these issues, the Pact for the Future, was agreed last Sunday despite heavy Russian opposition. Griffin said a group of wrangling nations had made progress on several intractable topics, including the international financial architecture, and newly developing technologies such as AI, and what she described as “everything from cyberspace to outer space.” But one of the key points was how and where decisions were made on important issues such as tax and trade. Historically, major decisions have often been taken at the Group of 20 largest economies, or the Group of Seven advanced economies, or in other places where countries of the global south have struggled to make their voices heard. The U.N. Security Council is another key body where those decisions are made, and another place where the global north has dominated. Security Council reform has been under discussion at the United Nations for more than 20 years. African nations have wanted stronger representation, while heavyweight economies such as India, Germany, Japan, and Brazil have lobbied strongly for permanent places on the council. However there has been significant resistance from the current permanent members — the United States, the United Kingdom, France, China, and Russia, collectively known as the P5. Griffin said that Security Council reform would be difficult, but was now closer than ever. “They've agreed to do it,” she said. “Now, I know that the cynics in the room might say, ‘Well, that doesn't mean anything,’ but this is actually the first concrete agreement with a lot of detail in it to reform the council.” She conceded that there's more work ahead, but that even the P5 recognized that the legitimacy and credibility of the council has been affected by recent failures. “The Secretary General has said multiple times, ‘We can't create a future fit for our grandchildren with the systems built by our grandparents,’ and the council is one of the bodies that he most often points to. We've come to the point where even the P5 can't ignore that.” Griffin spoke about how the agreements in the pact might be implemented in practice. Part of the reason she is confident is because the agreement had come from international leaders themselves: “This was really about having heads of state come together and say, ‘we need the whole international architecture to work more effectively, and in order to do that, we're going to agree on a direction of travel,’” she said. She added that countries of the global south, in particular, had been heavily in favor of introducing the Pact, which gives them opportunities to be better served by the world’s political and financial architecture. And many of the changes proposed in the document can immediately be taken up at future conferences, such as the next U.N. Climate Change Conference, COP 29, which will take place in November. One of the key things to emerge from the negotiations, she said, was a greater emphasis on where decisions were made, with power shifting from the G7 and G20 to the United Nations.