Dáil Éireann Debate, Thursday - 24 June 2004
43 Aengus Ó Snodaigh asked the Minister for Foreign Affairs if he will report on the steps the Government took during the period of the Irish Presidency of the European Union in relation to UN reform and the promotion of the principle of UN primacy within the European Union. [18865/04]
View answerA central theme of Ireland's Presidency has been the promotion of a more effective multilateralism and the strengthening of the rules-based international order, with the United Nations at its centre. This was an urgent task given the international divisions that prompted Secretary-General Annan to state at the United Nations last September that the United Nations "had come to a fork in the road". One of the particular concerns which Secretary-General Annan pointed to last year was the need to reform the UN system. He drew attention to the inefficiency in the UN General Assembly which led to important substantive issues being crowded out by, as he put it, "repetitive and sterile debates". The current President of the General Assembly, Julian Hunte, the Foreign Minister of St. Lucia, has been an active promoter of revitalisation of the General Assembly. The EU, under Ireland's leadership, has worked hard in New York to support this process so that the working methods of the UN General Assembly are more efficient and its agenda is made more manageable. The EU has also worked hard in New York to reform and streamline the UN budgetary process.
Secretary-General Annan also drew attention to the widely held perception that the UN Security Council was not broadly representative of the UN membership and needed to be reformed. Ireland, nationally, remains centrally involved in the discussion of Security Council reform and supports an increase in the membership of the Security Council, in both the permanent and non-permanent categories, to reflect today's realities. However, there is no common position among European Union partners on this issue due to diverging perspectives and aspirations and therefore this is one aspect of UN reform on which the EU collectively does not pronounce in substantive terms. The divisions of last year posed serious questions about the future of the multilateral system and the primacy of the United Nations.
The Government believed it was vital for its EU Presidency to harness the considerable and growing economic and political profile of the European Union to strengthen the United Nations and increase the capacity of and confidence in the multilateral system. This approach took a number of concrete forms in the Irish Presidency programme. The Irish Presidency has worked closely with the EU Council Secretariat and the UN's Department of Peacekeeping Operations in the implementation of the EU-UN Joint Declaration on Co-operation in Crisis Management of September 2003. A Presidency paper elaborating modalities under which the EU could provide military capabilities in support of the UN was endorsed by the European Council last week. I formally presented this paper to UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, in New York yesterday. The Secretary General welcomed the paper's content and the efforts of the Irish Presidency in this area.
The Presidency paper identifies two main options for EU support to the UN in military crisis management including the establishment of a clearing-house process to enable EU member states to co-ordinate their contributions to a given UN operation and deployment of EU rapid response operations in response to a request from the UN. Work on a complementary document on civilian aspects is being taken forward by the appropriate Council bodies. Last November, Secretary General Annan established a high-level panel on threats, challenges and change composed of eminent international figures to analyse the nature of current and future threats to peace and security and assess how best international action could meet these challenges. The EU has made a written contribution, co-ordinated by the Irish Presidency, to assist the work of the panel. This contribution stresses, inter alia, the importance of dealing with long-standing challenges such as poverty and under-development as well as ensuring greater Security Council involvement in tackling more recent threats such as the global terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The EU contribution underlines the need for sustained international engagement with societies threatened with conflict or just emerging from conflict.
The EU, under Ireland's Presidency, has engaged actively with key regional partners on the issue of effective multilateralism. To heighten the profile of this issue, the EU has agreed declarations with the African Union, Latin America and the Caribbean and with our Asian partners in the Asia-Europe Meeting, ASEM, which reaffirm support for an effective multilateral system. This was also an important issue in at last Tuesday's EU Summit with Japan in Tokyo.
My meeting yesterday at the United Nations in New York with Secretary General Annan was very productive. We reviewed the European Union's support for the United Nations across a range of areas during Ireland's Presidency, as well as a number of pressing international issues. I assure the House that the Secretary General expressed deep appreciation of Ireland's work as EU Presidency to promote and advance EU-UN co-operation.
