Algeria’s priorities during its next mandate on the Security Council highlighted

LONDON – The Minister of Foreign Affairs and the National Community Abroad, Ahmed Attaf, highlighted, during his current visit to the United Kingdom, the priorities on which Algeria will emphasize during its next term on the United Nations Security Council, particularly issues related to the Arab world and the African continent.

Mr. Attaf took part on Tuesday evening as part of his working visit to the United Kingdom, in a consultative meeting on the Security Council, organized in the prestigious Wilton Park institution, where he delivered a speech.

He first expressed his thanks to the British Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Lord Ahmed Tariq for organizing this important discussion with current, outgoing and incoming African members of the Security Council.

Mr. Attaf then discussed the international context in which Algeria’s membership of the Security Council takes place and the priorities on which the country will emphasize during its next mandate.

“Joining the Security Council is rewarding, but also extremely demanding. We sincerely aspire to bring new perspectives, being fully aware of the particularly difficult context in which our mandate takes place,” Mr. Attaf told the participants in this meeting, while recalling that Algeria has already served three times as a non-permanent member of the Security Council, the last time in 2004-2005.

“The challenges facing us have become more diverse and more difficult to meet, and the promises of the United Nations system have proven more difficult to keep,” he continued.

Consequently, he noted, “it has become abundantly clear that the growing geopolitical divergences and divisions among the permanent members have impinged on all deliberations of the Security Council and inhibited the latter’s capacity for action.”

And added in this context: “This situation has revived global demands for comprehensive reform to help the Security Council overcome its internal difficulties and provide adequate responses to current challenges.”

So, continued the minister, “we also believe that we have no alternative to the Security Council and that we must make it work and live up to the aspirations and expectations that our people have collectively placed in it” .

“It is in this spirit that Algeria is preparing to join the Security Council, fully motivated to contribute its fair share to the collective effort to preserve international peace and security,” Mr. Attaf also underlined. .

Algeria will plead “firmly” to move beyond the status quo approach

The minister thus listed Algeria’s priorities in this wake which, he said, “consist above all of working to revive the interest and commitment of the Security Council in the resolution of conflicts and crises raging in the African and Arab regions, in close collaboration with the African Union and the Arab League.

“In Africa, the Sahel region has become home to the world’s highest concentration of hotspots of armed conflict and multidimensional crises, stretching in the form of an ‘arc of fire’, from the Red Sea to the Atlantic Ocean, from Sudan to Western Sahara,” he added.

“In just a few years, this region has become the global epicenter of terrorism and transnational organized crime, in a context of growing political instability caused by the recent resurgence of unconstitutional changes of government,” recalled Mr. Attaf.

In the Arab region, the ongoing tragedy in the occupied Palestinian territories, particularly in the besieged Gaza Strip, “is a horrific reminder of the urgent need to properly resolve the Palestinian question, in accordance with the two-state solution agreed by the international community decades ago,” he added.

By pursuing these priorities, “Algeria will strongly advocate the need to go beyond the status quo approach, to address the root causes of conflicts and crisis situations, to pay more attention to the role of women in peace processes and the fate of children in armed conflicts, to propose a new model of peace operations more adapted to contemporary contexts and finally to work hand in hand with regional organizations, in particular the African Union and the Arab League”, concluded Mr. Attaf.

APS