External affairs minister S Jaishankar on Monday said the United Nations needs urgent reform, arguing that the global body has increasingly failed to play a meaningful role in decisions on major international crises, including conflicts in Ukraine and the Gulf.
Yet the UN remains a prisoner of the past,” he had said at the 2nd Foreign Ministers meeting of G20 Brazil 2024. “Where the UN is concerned, I think it’s obvious to everybody by now that the UN is gridlocked. “The world has evolved into a smart, interconnected and multipolar arena and its members have increased fourfold since the UN’s inception. “So, if you have grown four times, and you want to keep the old board of management, it’s not going to work. Jaishankar shared the stage with former Singapore foreign minister George Yong Boon Yeo during the closing session of the three-day conclave.
If you look at the big issues of the day, whether you look at the conflict in the Gulf, whether you look at the conflict in Ukraine, whether you look at other issues in Africa, whether you look at Covid, actually, the United Nations has been largely irrelevant to the decision-making,” Jaishankar said. “I think, again there’s a widely held view that a lot of it is because the (UN) Security Council is gridlocked, that the Security Council no longer represents the entirety of the global interest,” he said. I mean, it’s common sense,” he said. Without naming any country, Jaishankar said some nations were opposing changes to the UN while invoking Africa’s interests to justify their position. He said African countries themselves have clearly articulated their position on the issue.
