UNITED NATIONS, United States, Feb 20, 2021 (BSS/AFP) – Britain has
circulated a draft resolution to members of the UN Security Council calling
on rich countries to donate doses of the Covid-19 vaccine to poorer and war-
torn states, according to a text of the draft seen by AFP Friday.
The resolution, submitted Thursday by Britain to the other 14 members of
the Security Council, “emphasises the need for solidarity, equity, and
efficacy and invites donation of vaccine doses from developed economies to
low- and middle-income countries and other countries in need.”
The draft resolution was announced Wednesday by Foreign Secretary Dominic
Raab during a session of the Security Council, and estimates that around 160
million people worldwide are living in a conflict zone or unstable
circumstances that puts them at risk of not receiving a vaccination.
The text “calls for the strengthening of national and multilateral
approaches and international cooperation… in order to facilitate equitable
access to Covid-19 vaccines including in armed conflict situations.”
It also “demands that all parties to armed conflicts engage immediately in
a durable, extensive, and sustained humanitarian pause to enable, inter alia,
Covid-19 vaccinations in areas of armed conflict.”
It calls on UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who this week denounced
the “wildly uneven and unfair” distribution of vaccines around the world, “to
report on the implementation of this resolution, in particular a full
assessment of all the impediments to the Covid-19 response, including
vaccination programmes, in countries in situations of armed conflict and
complex humanitarian emergencies, as necessary and at least every 90 days.”
Last year, it took the Security Council, stalemated by Chinese-US rivalry,
three months to adopt its one and only resolution to date on the pandemic,
which called upon warring factions to halt operations to allow for a vaccine
to be distributed.
London hopes its resolution will be adopted in the coming weeks.
But Russia could be difficult to convince after stating this week that the
issue of vaccines did not fall within the ambit of the Security Council.
Meanwhile, a 34-year-old Canadian announced her plans to challenge the 71-
year-old Guterres for the position of UN secretary-general when his current
term expires in January 2022.
Arora Akanksha, who was born in India and currently works in the UN
development agency, said in a letter that the United Nations was “not living
up to our purpose or our promise. We are failing those we are here to serve.
We are here to solve humanitarian crises, not perpetuate them.”
Brenden Varma, spokesman for the president of the UN General Assembly,
Volkan Bozkir, stressed that “individuals could only become candidates once
their names were circulated to Member States by the Presidents of the General
Assembly and Security Council.”
As of Friday, no other candidates aside from Guterres had been announced by
the UN, although the organization’s pick likely will not be announced until
the summer.