General Assembly Session 62 meeting 50

Mr. Ehouzou (Benin)

On behalf of my delegation, Mr. President, I thank you for convening this meeting to consider the report of the Security Council (A/62/2). I am grateful to the President of the Council for presenting it. I also thank the Secretary-General for his notification pursuant to paragraph 2 of Article 12 of the Charter (A/62/300). My delegation associates itself with the statement made by the Permanent Representative of Angola on behalf of the Group of African States.

Reading the report makes us aware of the many challenges that the Council faced during the period under review. Outstanding progress has been made in managing such issues, thanks to the Council's commitment and firmness. Nevertheless, a great deal remains to be done in order to restrain the serious threats to international peace and security.

In the area of peacekeeping, Africa continues to take up a considerable proportion of the Council's agenda. We welcome the synergy that has been established between the Security Council and the African Union, which has enabled the two bodies to cooperate and gradually integrate the peace and security architecture of the African Union into the system of collective security established by the Charter.

Implementation of the Ten-Year Capacity-Building Programme to strengthen the capacities of the African Union will help the efforts to bring long-term stability to the continent. We urge the Security Council to continue to promote the Programme and to improve coordination of its activities in Africa with the African Union Peace and Security Council. We hope that the forthcoming report of the Secretary-General on relations between the United Nations and the African Union will contain concrete recommendations on improving the structure of cooperation.

We welcome the Security Council's efforts to strengthen its actions to prevent the outbreak of new crises threatening international peace and security. The Council should establish an institutional framework to make its efforts more systematic and effective, as is currently the case with regard to preventing the resurgence of conflict by promoting peacebuilding in the framework of the Peacebuilding Commission established in December 2005.

We welcome the practice of Security Council visits to the countries on its agenda, in particular to African countries as well as to the headquarters of the African Union. This makes it possible to intensify consultations with the parties involved, particularly with the Peace and Security Council of the African Union, as well as to harmonize options and approaches to joint solutions in order to overcome the problems identified.

In this connection, the decision to deploy a hybrid mission to Darfur marks a significant evolution in cooperation and a better division of labour. We also welcome the efforts to improve the prospects of a lasting peace in West Africa. The Council's report emphasizes that, in spite of the grave concerns caused by the proliferation of light weapons, the situation appears more promising than it has been for some years.

The considerable efforts to promote international justice and combat impunity for crimes connected with massive violations of human rights and international humanitarian law must be continued. The Council should consolidate the achievements made in this regard, so that the implementation of completion strategies does not call into question the possibility of prosecuting fugitives, which is essential to the preservation of peace in the countries concerned.

The Council should also ensure that the jurisprudence of the international criminal tribunals is accessible to those countries at all times. The African Union must also be considered as a possible destination for the records of the proceedings of the tribunals operating in Africa. In this respect, there should be cooperation with the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights.

It is noteworthy that the Security Council has conducted a fruitful dialogue with Member States on general issues pertaining to international peace and security, especially through public and thematic debates. The views expressed by States in that dialogue should be taken into account so that this extremely valuable exercise of thematic debates may give rise to a constant momentum, strengthening the effectiveness of the Council's action.

The fact remains that the Security Council in its current configuration has inconsistencies that affect its capacity for action. We hope that steps will be taken during the current session to carry out the long awaited reform of the Council. My delegation looks forward to this reform, which should affect the two categories of seats on the Council and its working methods. Our views are well known on the bold steps needed to enhance the Council's representativity, and thus its legitimacy and authority.

In general, we should take advantage of the significant progress achieved during the course of the sixty-first session, which should serve as the basis for determining the parameters of the Council's new configuration so that it can respond to the new geopolitical realities of the 21st century. This new configuration should take into consideration the need to correct the historic injustice done to Africa by its exclusion from the permanent seats on the Security Council. We repeat the legitimate claim of the African continent to two permanent seats and five non-permanent seats to provide equitable representation of all of its subregions, in accordance with the Ezulwini Consensus and the 2005 Syrte Declaration. Reform must ensure an equitable representation of developing countries, as well as a geographical distribution of seats, taking into account the numeric weight of each region within the Organization.

In the same vein, we should firmly commit to reform of the Council's working methods to clearly take into account and express the sovereign equality of Member States and other cardinal principles of the Charter. The consideration that the Council has begun on this matter deserves to be pursued, taking into account Member States' specific proposals, and in particular those of the "S-5" group, which my delegation supports.

At the end of the sixty-first session, Mr. President, under the visionary leadership of your predecessor, Sheikha Haya Rashed Al Khalifa -- to whom I pay tribute -- the General Assembly gave a clear mandate on the next stage of Security Council reform. As you so well emphasized in your statement at the beginning of the current session, we must have the courage to begin the next phase, which should lead to concrete results. The next phase of which you spoke is intergovernmental negotiations to provide the United Nations and the international community with a Security Council that is more representative in its composition, more transparent, more inclusive in its working methods, and thus more effective in dealing with threats to international peace and security.

We count on you, Mr. President, to conduct the negotiations, and encourage you to appoint one or two coordinators to help you in that very delicate exercise. Before the end of this session we should -- working modestly, calmly and with determination -- reach agreement on the substance of a bold reform meeting the expectations of the international community and the peoples of the United Nations, especially in the twenty-first century.