Statement by Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Vershinin on amending the draft Pact for the future
Mr President,
When UN General Assembly Resolution A/RES/76/307 was adopted almost two years ago, we all explicitly agreed that the outcome document of our Summit, a Pact for the Future, should be “agreed in advance by consensus through intergovernmental negotiations”.
Unfortunately, that objective has not been attained. The text put forward today, in violation of the adoption procedure, was not supported by a number of delegations. Strictly speaking, we have nothing to adopt today, and this is not the fault of the current President of the General Assembly and his team: they inherited this problem from their predecessors and they did their best to deal with it. What they lacked is time.
The Pact will be certainly highly commended today by the UN and those who were in charge of the negotiations. Colleagues, we want you to get a sense that all this will sound hypocritical. The truth is that there were essentially no intergovernmental negotiations on the Pact. There was not a single meeting where delegations came together around the table and negotiated the text of the draft, section-by-section and paragraph-by-paragraph. From the very outset, those who coordinated the work on the draft included in it only what was dictated to them mainly by Western countries. The points of contention piled up and were never resolved. None of our requests to sit down at the negotiating table and discuss them were met. This is not what is considered and called multilateralism, which many like to speechify about. What happened is a huge defeat for the UN, because the principle of the sovereign equality of states, which is enshrined in the Charter, was cynically sacrificed to one group of countries whose interests had been carefully safeguarded for all these months. And the coordinators of the negotiations decided at its sole discretion what should be included in this or that document – and what should not. Never before have we witnessed such despotism on the UN platform.
We have heard from many delegations – and not only from those breaking the silence but also from those supporting the draft Pact – that they are not comfortable with many things in this draft. What about the principle of ‘leaving no one behind’, which the Secretary-General is so fond of? In fact, none of the UN members is fully satisfied with the text. And it is the document that will define our future. Can the future be built on such a basis? Is this the maximum we can give to future generations?
Mr President,
The best thing would be not to try to adopt today a raw and non-consensual text, but to agree to continue negotiations until the document is approved by all without exception. And there should be direct negotiations between delegations, not maneuvers of coordinators. This will not be a defeat for anyone; on the contrary, it will be a victory for all of us. A victory for multilateralism and the UN Charter. We hope that you, Mr. President, will summon the courage to propose such a procedural solution, and the details can be finalized in the course of our Summit.
Should you decide to move forward and push through a non-consensual text, then on behalf of the group of States – the Republic of Belarus, Nicaragua and the Russian Federation – we would like to introduce an amendment to the draft Pact for the Future and its annexes.
At the heart of our amendment lies the principle of non-interference in matters within domestic jurisdiction of a State, as set forth in Article 2, Paragraph 7 of the UN Charter, which the UN is obliged to comply with. This is one of the fundamental principles of international law, but it was never reflected in the Pact. The amendment reaffirms the key role of the intergovernmental nature of UN decision-making process. The amendment stresses the need to avoid duplication of efforts and to achieve maximum efficiency of the UN resources. All this is particularly important in the context of the current liquidity crisis facing the Organization.
The amendment is not about ignoring the aspirations of the Global South but, on the contrary, about protecting them from the future pressure by the collective West, which, failing to fulfil its previous commitments, for example on the SDGs, seeks to impose new obligations on others. And today, they will probably hide behind the backs of the Global South.
Given the content of our amendment and the circumstances of its introduction, we count on the support of all delegations.
Those who would put our amendment to a vote are essentially seeking to undermine the intergovernmental nature of the UN and challenge its Charter.
If the proposed amendment is not included in the text of the Pact, Russia will distance itself from the consensus on this document and on the Global Digital Compact, especially with regard to the provisions on disarmament, as well as on the participation of non-governmental organizations in the work of the United Nations and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.
In any case, we believe that it is necessary to emphasize that the Pact cannot be viewed as a document that automatically creates new mandates and obligations for Member States. It is simply a declaration, and a very vague one. New mandates and obligations may emerge only as a result of intergovernmental processes, which should be carried out in a way, that would be fundamentally different from the one the work on the Pact and its annexes was organized.
Thank you for your attention.
