United Nations General Assembly President Abdulla Shahid has said that the Security Council reform process has taken “baby steps” by introducing a new element that creatively bends the moribund system, but admitted it did not meet his expectations.

Shahid, who completes his year-long UNGA presidency next week, said on Wednesday, that he had “mixed feelings”: While “happy that we made some progress during my presidency” he was also left “with the unhappy feeling that it didn't happen”.

At his final news conference, he spoke of the progress in getting member states to agree on a new element in the process, “unformals” to get it moving.

The term ”unformals” is an addition to diplomat-speak like paper documents that are called “non-papers” or “oral decisions” that are put down on paper and given oxymoronic names to smoothen the pathways of diplomacy. 

Shahid explained that because the reform negotiation process itself is technically informal without formal records or agendas, “there cannot be any informal, informals, so they created the 'unformals' where the issues can be addressed in a much more open manner”. 

This diplomatic workaround was introduced by Permanent Representatives Martin Bille Hermann of Denmark and Alya Ahmed Saif Al-Thani of Qatar, who are co-chairs of the Intergovernmental Negotiations (IGN), as the reform process is formally known.

A small group of countries, including Pakistan and Italy, who call themselves United for Consensus (UfC), have been blocking the adoption of a formal negotiating text or procedures for the negotiations and the labelling of some discussions as “unformals” is an apparent sop to them.

“So this new creativity was brought in, and because of the new creative approach, we were able to have a number of ‘divergences’ moved to the paper on convergence”, Shahid said. 

Again, what the diplomat-speak means is that because of the vigorous opposition to the adoption of a negotiating text, the informal document called the Elements Paper on Convergences and Divergences that could serve as the basis of negotiations has seen some movement in identifying differences on Council reforms.

“So these are baby steps, but in the process that has taken over 14 years,  one should (not) have too much of an expectation”, Shahid said.

Illustrating the difficulty in getting the UN members to agree on reforms, he said that his country, the Maldives, was one of the ten countries that had signed a letter in 1971 calling for reform of the Council

The 60-year-old Assembly president, who was previously foreign minister of the Maldives, said he was nine years old and quipped,  “And just look at me and see what has happened to me”!

“There is nothing more than I would have loved to have the Security Council reform process completed in my presidency”, he said.

Shahid mentioned two important measures in the Assembly during his presidency to make the Council take public responsibility for its failures.

For the first time in 40 years, the Assembly convened an Emergency Special Session on “Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine”, he said.

That meeting under the “Uniting for Peace Resolution” format met after Russia’s vetoes brought the Council to a standstill on the Ukraine issue.

The other was the landmark resolution adopted by consensus to hold the five permanent Council members accountable for their use of veto, he said.

It requires the Assembly president to convene a formal meeting within ten days of a veto to discuss it and have the permanent member casting the veto explain it.

Giving an overall assessment of his presidency, Shahid said, “I called my Presidency, that of Hope. To bring hope at a time of turmoil. And I think that I have worked towards that objective”.