THE UN: A proposal to expand the Security Council to 24 members from the present 15 is one of more than 100 recommendations in a special report on reforming the United Nations, writes Deaglán de Bréadún, Foreign Affairs Correspondent
The report was issued by a 16-member panel appointed last year by the organisation's Secretary General, Mr Kofi Annan.
The 95-page report, entitled A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, rejects the concept of unilateral preventive action against a perceived imminent threat. Member-states should make their case for "anticipatory self-defence" to the council which would have the power to authorise military action. It concedes that the council may have to act earlier, more proactively and more decisively than in the past.
On council reform, although the panel of senior diplomatic and political figures from different countries was agreed on the need for nine extra seats, it was divided on the question of how these should be allocated.
One alternative would add six permanent members from Asia, Africa, the Americas and Europe - the frontrunners are thought to be Brazil, Germany, India, Japan, Egypt and either Nigeria or South Africa - as well as three new two-year term members.
The other would be to create an extra tier of eight semi-permanent members chosen for renewable four-year terms and one additional two-year term seat. However, the right of veto would still be limited to the existing five permanent members, or "P5". These are: China, France, the Russian Federation, the UK and US.
Two-thirds of the 191 UN member-nations would have to approve any change to council membership, which would take effect if none of the permanent members uses its veto to block the move.
The report by the High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change was commissioned to propose ways of strengthening international security and arose out of a widespread feeling that the UN was not properly geared to meet the contemporary challenges of terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, ethnic conflicts, failed states and cross-border crime.
The relevance of the UN today came into question during the bitter controversy over US plans for an invasion of Iraq to pre-empt the alleged threat of missile attacks by the Saddam Hussein regime. Mr Annan told the General Assembly the international community had come to a "fork in the road".
The report accepts that new international circumstances have arisen "where the threat is not imminent but still claimed to be real: for example, the acquisition, with allegedly hostile intent, of nuclear weapons-making capability." But it makes clear that any preventive action to deal with a perceived imminent threat should still require Security Council approval.
In an implicit sideswipe at the Bush administration, the report says: "There is little evident international acceptance of the idea of security being best preserved by a balance of power or by any single - even benignly motivated - superpower."
It endorses the idea of a collective "responsibility to protect" civilian populations from genocide and so-called "ethnic cleansing". The wider international community should be allowed to intervene, but only using force as a resort. It also defines terrorism in legalistic detail as unwarranted attacks on civilians and non-combatants.
It urges the creation of a new UN body, the peace-building commission, which would identify countries at risk of violent conflict, organise prevention efforts and "marshal and sustain the efforts of the international community in post-conflict peace-building".
Mr Annan plans to take the panel's recommendations into account in a report of his own in March. This will help set the agenda for a special UN summit of world leaders next September.
The report was welcomed by the Irish development agency, Goal, which said the recommendations would give the Security Council power to intervene militarily in situations where vulnerable populations were being terrorised or murdered.
Mr John O'Shea, CEO of Goal said: "If the UN was doing its job properly, the people of Darfur and northern Uganda would not be suffering as they are today."
Chaired by former Thai prime minister Anand Panyarachun, the other members of the panel were: Robert Badinter (France), Gro Harlem Brundtland (Norway), Mary Chinery-Hesse (Ghana), Gareth Evans (Australia), David Hannay (Britain), Enrique Iglesias (Uruguay), Amr Moussa (Egypt), Satish Nambiar (India), Sadako Ogata (Japan), Yevgeny M. Primakov (Russia), Qian Qichen (China), Nafis Sadiq (Pakistan), Salim Ahmed Salim (Tanzania), Brent Scowcroft (United States) and Joao Baena Soares (Brazil).