2 October, 2024

Security Council reform was one of the subjects dealt with in the UN’s ‘Pact for the Future’ that was comfortably adopted by consensus in the General Assembly on 22 September 2024. The Pact had been promoted by the Organization’s leadership, nurtured by diplomacy ‘facilitated’ by Germany and Namibia, and had easily overcome last-minute Russian opposition. Even one of the usual suspects happy to stand to attention when Moscow snaps its fingers – or at least adopt a posture of friendly neutrality – misbehaved.

The first paragraphs of Chapter V of The Pact for the Future (hopefully called ‘Actions’) suggest that the defense of the status quo on Security Council membership has eroded a little further. For it was agreed that it would be enlarged in order to be more representative, notably by rectification of ‘the historical injustice against Africa’ (Action 39, para. 67a). But this would need somehow to be balanced with ‘effectiveness’.  As for the veto on substantive questions of the Permanent 5 (the USA, France, Britain, China and Russia), efforts to resolve this matter would be intensified.

All members of the P5 can be expected to cling tenaciously to both to their permanent seats on the Security Council and their veto power, no more so than Russia, despite the fact that a dozen states make larger contributions to the UN’s regular budget, some of them vastly more. It is worth noting, however, that for Moscow the Pact for the Future presents a more immediate worry – and reinforces its more obvious reasons for clinging to its privileged position on the Security Council. This is the emphasis in the Pact’s preamble on multilateralism in general and international law and human rights in particular, and, moreover, its failure to give any mention at all of the primacy of domestic jurisdiction as provided in Article 2(7) of the UN Charter. At the last moment, therefore, Russia proposed a concluding amendment to its preamble. This affirmed that the UN ‘shall be driven by inter-governmental decision-making’, emphatically honour Article 2(7) of the Charter, and – if I understand it correctly – thereby avoid duplication of effort by multilateral agencies and states’ own governments. (What need is there for the UN to interest itself in human rights abuses in Russia when the Kremlin is quite capable of dealing with this problem itself, even providing snug holiday homes for dissidents in sunny Siberia?)

It is gratifying to note that, partly because of its absurd lateness, the Russian amendment was hopelessly lost. In a recorded vote on a motion for its dismissal proposed by the Congo Republic speaking for the African Group as a whole, 143 voted in favour with only 7 against. In addition to Russia, the usual suspects dutifully lined up behind it: Belarus, Nicaragua, North Korea, Iran, Syria and Sudan, the last named being still suspended from the African Union because of the 2021 coup so unlikely to have felt the pull of African solidarity. China, which was invisible in public discussion of the Congolese motion, abstained, together with 14 other countries, among them Cuba, Iraq, Laos, Malaysia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Sri Lanka.

It is particularly interesting, indeed encouraging, that South Africa was one of the states that voted for the UN Pact for the Future, declining even to abstain on the Russian amendment. For its ANC government had hitherto adopted a policy of friendly neutrality towards Moscow since the invasion of Ukraine and routinely abstained on anti-Russian votes at the UN, partly on the mistaken grounds that the former Soviet Union played an important role in the ending of apartheid. Notable examples include its abstention on the General Assembly resolution in March 2022 that condemned Russian aggression against Ukraine and demanded the immediate withdrawal of its military forces, and then on the subsequent resolution condemning Russia’s annexation of territories in Eastern Ukraine. It also sent only a lowly ‘envoy’ (the South African president’s trouble-shooter, Sydney Mufamadi) to the Summit on Peace in Ukraine in Switzerland in June 2024 and was among the small minority that did not sign its Joint Communiqué on a Peace Framework.

So why did South Africa emphatically desert the Russians on the UN Pact for the Future, passing up even the opportunity to abstain on the Russian amendment under the cover of fairly mixed company? It might well be, as my good friend and former colleague, James Hamill, has suggested to me, that it could reflect the influence of the Democratic Alliance, which had been very critical of the ANC’s pro-Russia policy, in the new Government of National Unity in Pretoria since June 2024. But even without this there are plenty of other reasons. To begin with, any hint of sympathy for the Russian amendment would not only have placed South Africa out of step with African sentiment in general on the Pact but also shown scant respect for the diplomatic labours of its close neighbour Namibia. It was probably not lost on the ANC either that Article 2(7) of the UN Charter, which Russia was flagging up, was precisely the one on which the old apartheid government of South Africa had for decades taken its stand in denying the right of the UN to act against its racist policies at home. Finally, it would be astonishing should South Africa not have seen that it would be a strong candidate for a permanent – albeit non-veto wielding – seat on the Security Council in the Pact’s promise to prioritise righting ‘the historical injustice against Africa’ in reform of what is more than ever a diplomatic institution crucial to international peace and security.