Sir, – Your editorial "Yet again, Moscow says no" (December 15th) provides a rather shallow and judgmental view on the work of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). It is especially regrettable that The Irish Times has once again engaged in a disparaging and insulting attitude toward Russia ("Putin regime's paranoia", "narrow-minded obstructionism").
The Russian Federation voted against the draft UNSC resolution on climate and security submitted by Ireland and Niger. Their initiative may have been well intentioned, but not very well thought through. The authors of the document were pushing it through without readiness to discuss the root causes of challenges that vulnerable countries face. It resulted in a split among the UNSC members. It is unfortunate that the subject for the divide was climate which, by its nature, is a unifying agenda, as was demonstrated by the recent consensus achieved in Glasgow. We fully share the concerns of the international community regarding the adverse effects of climate change on the planet and contribute to global efforts to address these challenges, including in the context of achieving carbon neutrality of our economy by 2060.
The proposed document was coercing the UNSC to take a one-dimensional approach to conflicts and threats to international peace and security, ie through the climate lens. It was a generic proposal to establish this automatic link while neglecting all other aspects of situations in countries in conflict or countries lagging behind in their socio-economic development.
As a responsible member of the United Nations and its Security Council, the Russian Federation, along with India and China, do not share such an approach. We recognise the range of complex and intertwined challenges, including the impact of climate change, natural disasters, poverty, poor local governance that is mostly rooted in the colonial past, and terrorism threats that are an intolerable burden for some countries and regions. Guided by this approach, Russia, together with India and China, has submitted a draft UNSC resolution on the Sahel region. Our draft, in contrast to the one put forward by Ireland and Niger, encompasses the whole range of issues pertinent to the region and is aimed at mobilising international efforts, including on finance, to provide comprehensive assistance to those in need.
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We are ready for substantive and constructive work on the draft with all members of the UN Security Council. And we certainly do not share The Irish Times’s opinion of the UNSC as “anachronistic”.
We and the bulk of the members of international community regard the UN Security Council as an important mechanism of checks and balances which ensures that one-sided approaches do not find their way into decisions by the highest UN authority. – Yours, etc,
YURIY FILATOV,
Ambassador,
Russian Federation,
Rathgar,
Dublin 14.
Sir, – I was delighted to read that our Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney, with the support of Taoiseach Micheál Martin, proposed a resolution to the UN Security Council, while holding the presidency of the UNSC, that climate change, given its risk to global human security, must be a permanent fixture on the council's agenda ("Russia vetoes Irish-led UN resolution on climate action", World, December 13th).
This proposal makes absolute sense when we read and learn of the violent consequences of climate change. Lives are being lost, communities can no longer produce enough food due to drought, millions are threatened in their vulnerable homes due to flooding, and mass movements of people are threatening the harmony of national borders. Violence and lost lives, conflict, storms, and melting ice are reported daily.
Of course, threats to peace and security due to growing climate change belong on the agenda of the Security Council, side by side with military or other threats to sharing diminishing global space viable for human habitation and wellbeing.
And it is noteworthy that 12 members of the 15 members of the UNSC supported this Irish initiative, together with 100 member states of the UN General Assembly.
When I reported to the Security Council through the Secretary General in 1997/98 from Iraq as head of the so-called Oil for Food Programme, a UNSC-controlled humanitarian endeavour to support some 25 million people in Iraq, employing not aid or charity but UN control of the total revenue of Iraq oil sales, I was only too conscious that two of the five veto powers, Britain and the US, failed to appreciate the death rates of children and adults due to the comprehensive and open-ended UN sanctions imposed on the civilians of Iraq, imposed as punishment for the catastrophic mistake by the Iraqi government of invading Kuwait.
As Mr Coveney has stated, the understanding of peace and security responsibilities of the UNSC needs to be expanded to include the new violence of climate change. And he rightly points out that the veto power concept needs to be examined.
It was in Yalta in 1945 that impending victors Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill created the UN Security Council to centralise miliary power, missing in the then defunct League of Nations. Control of global member states was deemed essential, then some 50 and now some 195 independent countries.
The three men mentioned above invited France and China into their exclusive group. And today, as Mr Coveney has suggested, that cabal needs to be changed. I do not know his thinking, but in my view the UN requires a Security Council that is globally representative of its 195 member states. Veto power should be dropped and each region of our complex world should have a permanent seat. This seat could be rotated every three years within each region. For example, sub-Saharan Africa could elect Niger and three years later Kenya. The seat occupant would speak with the authority of the entire region. The EU would elect one state. The same for southeast Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and so on.
And importantly, the current and impending impact of climate change would be conspicuously on the agenda for appropriate attention in the context of peace, security and human wellbeing.
DENIS J HALLIDAY,
Dublin 6.