India joined Japan on Friday in calling for more determined efforts to reform the UN as the two Asian powers pitched for permanent seats in the Security Council.
Speaking at the UN General Assembly, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh criticized scant progress made since world leaders decided three years ago to forge an “agenda for early and meaningful reform” of the world body.
“The composition of the Security Council needs to change to reflect contemporary realities of the 21st century,” he said.
“We must acknowledge frankly that there has been little progress on the core elements of the reform agenda,” Singh said.
He then called for “more determined efforts to revitalize the General Assembly to enable it to fulfill its rightful role as the principal deliberative organ of the United Nations.”
On Thursday, Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso emphasized “the absolute imperative” of council reform, in his address to the assembly.
“We must bring about the early reform of the Security Council through an expansion of both the permanent and non-permanent memberships,” he said.
Aso was the first Japanese prime minister to speak at the General Assembly since 2005.
The assembly decided last week to begin inter-governmental talks on expanding the council by Feb. 28.
Japan and India joined Germany and Brazil in 2005 in a strong push to be in the council as permanent members, along with two African countries, but without veto rights.
But their bid failed after it ran into strong opposition from China and the US as well as from regional rivals such as Italy, Pakistan and Argentina.
Japan is bidding for one of the a non-permanent seats on the council next month.
The thorny issue of how to enlarge the 15-member council to make it more representative and reflective of today’s global realities has for years divided the UN membership. The council has 10 rotating, non-permanent members and five veto-wielding permanent ones (China, the US, France, Britain and Russia). Its makeup has remained largely unchanged since the UN’s establishment of the UN in 1945.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema