India, Germany, Brazil, Japan ‘absolutely needed’ at UNSC as permanent members: France

France said to the UN that nations such as India, Germany, Brazil and Japan are “absolutely needed” as permanent members of a reformed and enlarged UN Security Council to better reflect contemporary realities and the addition of these key members to the UN high-table is among France’s “strategic” priorities.

“In terms of policy, France and Germany have strong policy which is to work together to enlarge the Security Council and to succeed in terms of the negotiations that should lead to the enlargement of the Security Council that we consider absolutely needed to better reflect the world as it is. There is no question about it,” France’s Permanent Representative to the UN Delattre told reporters last week.

Noting that when France and Germany launched their alliance for multi-materialism, Delattre said it signifies that the two nations strongly believe in the UN as the core of today’s global governance and that they strongly believe in “multilateralism” which means that we are actively working to reform and in some respects to revamp and reinvent multilateralism so that it is really efficient for the decades to come.

Delattre emphasised that, “France considers that Germany, Japan, India, Brazil and a fair representation of Africa in particular are absolutely needed at the table to get towards a fairer representation of the Security Council. This is for us a matter of priority.”

France has maintained that if the crises of recent times have confirmed the centrality of the UN, they have also reinforced the need to make the organisation more effective and more representative of the current balances in the world.

“That is why France pushes for the expansion of the Security Council by supporting the accession to a permanent seat of Germany, Brazil, India, Japan, as well as a greater presence of African countries,” according to the Permanent Mission of France.