US President Joe Biden and the prime ministers of India, Japan and Australia called for a reform of the UN Security Council to include new permanent members from Africa, Asia and Latin America, according to a joint statement following a meeting in the QUAD (Quad group of nations) format.
“We will reform the UN Security Council, recognizing the urgent need to make it more representative, inclusive, transparent, effective, democratic and accountable by expanding the permanent and non-permanent categories of UN Security Council membership.” – indicated in the text of the document.
It is stressed that the expansion of permanent seats should include the representation of new countries from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean in the reformed Security Council.
The Security Council is a permanent structure of the United Nations, which has the primary responsibility for maintaining international peace and security. The Security Council includes 15 countries: five permanent members and 10 temporary members. Permanent: Russia, the United States, Great Britain, China and France. They have veto power. The remaining ten are elected for a two-year term. Japan, Ecuador, Switzerland, Mozambique and Malta are elected for 2023 and 2024, and Slovenia, Algeria, Sierra Leone, South Korea and Guyana are elected for 2024-2025.
The QUAD-format meeting will be the last for the US president joe biden and Prime Minister of Japan Fumio Kishida after both announced they would not seek re-election: the first as President of the United States, the second as Chairman of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and Prime Minister of Japan.
The QUAD (Quadrilateral Security Dialogue) format was initiated in 2007 by the Prime Minister of Japan. Shinzo Abe as an informal consultative mechanism of four countries that share the values of a free and open Indo-Pacific region. Moreover, if Japan and Australia are allies of the United States, then India, which is not connected to Washington by allied relations, was included among the “four” largely due to its growing role in the Indo-Pacific region and its confrontation with China.
