Saturday, 26 September 2015

UNSC must include world's largest democracies, PM Modi says at G4 summit

NEW YORK: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday continued his strong pitch for the inclusion of India in the United Nations security council. He was addressing a meeting of leaders of the G4 countries - Brazil, Germany, India and Japan - that support each other's efforts for permanent seats on an expanded security council.

"The UNSC must include the world's largest democracies (that are) major locomotives of the global economy, and voices from all the major continents," Prime Minister Narendra Modi said. "The reform of the security council, within a fixed time frame, has become an urgent and important task," he added.

This was the first meeting of the countries' leaders since 2004, when the G4 was formed. Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff, Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel and Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe were present at the meeting hosted by PM Modi. The four countries came together in 2004 bound by a "shared commitment to global peace," Modi said. Japan's Abe said the G4 meeting is a "golden opportunity" and added that there was a "mounting momentum for change" and that "voices of great nations should be heard."

"We live in a fundamentally different world from when the UN was born, faced with complex and undefined challenges," he added. With trends in demography and migrations posing new challenges, and with climate change and terrorism becoming new and major concerns, a reformed security council is the need of the hour to ensure world peace and the security of its peoples.

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