3 February 2024

Chapter 9:  RELATIONS WITH OTHER ORGANS AND ENTITIES

Section 1g:  Annual and special reports of the Security Council to the General Assembly

Momentum builds to restore status of presidency assessments as national outcomes, not Council consensus documents 

Russia and United States, reversing their earlier participation, have not submitted since 2015

By the end of 2023, the monthly assessments for six of the twelve Council presidencies for that year have been published:

January – Japan

February – Malta

March – Mozambique

May – Switzerland

June – United Arab Emirates

July – United Kingdom

The six presidency assessments for 2023 which have not yet been published are:

April – Russian Federation

August – United States

September – Albania

October – Brazil

November – China

December – Ecuador

Because Albania, Brazil and China published assessments for their 2022 presidencies, it is anticipated that they will eventually also do so for 2023. Ecuador, whose only presidency was in 2023, is expected to publish its assessment as well. On the other hand, the Russian Federation is not likely to issue its assessment for the year, since it has failed to do so for all seven of its Council presidencies since 2015. There is a similar expectation regarding the United States, because it has neglected to publish assessments for all six of its presidencies since 2017.

Monthly presidency assessments were launched in 1997 by presidential note S/1997/451. This was before the Security Council decided to take upon itself the responsibility for drafting the Introduction of its Annual Report to the General Assembly. Rather, at that time the Introduction was merely an explanation of how the report was organized written by the Secretariat. The 1997 presidential note thus represented a first effort by Council members to introduce more meaningful content into the report, especially now that factual information about the Security Council was increasingly available via the internet.

In the 1997 presidential note, the Council members decided that:

“5. There will also be attached, as an addendum to the [annual] report, brief assessments on the work of the Security Council, which representatives who have completed their functions as President of the Security Council may wish to prepare, under their own responsibility and following consultations with members of the Council for the month during which they presided and which should not be considered as representing the views of the Council.” (our emphases)

This latter caveat that the assessments “should not necessarily be considered as representing the views of the Security Council” was emphasized by the next paragraph in S/1997/451. It established the exact wording of a disclaimer that was to “appear at the beginning of the addendum [in the Annual Report] containing the above-mentioned assessments”. This language, framed in a box on the presidential note, reads:

“The attachment of the assessments of former Presidents on the work of the Security Council as an addendum to the report is intended to have an informative purpose and should not necessarily be considered as representing the views of the Security Council.” (our emphasis)

From their inception in 1997 through 2000, most assessments were appended to the Annual Report, as had been provided for in S/1997/451. However, because not all of them could be finalized before the report’s issuance, assessments which missed the cut-off had to be published as separate Security Council documents. In order to avoid the confusion of presenting assessments in two different formats, from 2001 forward all have been issued as separate documents, with only the document symbols included in the annual report.

Issuing the assessments as individual Council documents reinforces the fact that they are not consensus documents. This is because each assessment is published under a cover letter signed only by the authoring Council member’s representative in their national capacity. If assessments were consensus documents, the practice would have been to issue them under cover of a letter by the Council President.

Although note S/1997/451 made clear that presidency assessments were optional, for many years they were published as a matter of routine by virtually all Council members. From their inception in mid-1997 through 2014, only two delegations failed to submit them (see Chart and Table at the end of this article.) Then the situation changed dramatically. Submissions tapered off in 2015, and hit a low point in 2016 with only three out of twelve assessments published. As of January 2024, 40 presidencies have failed to publish assessments since 2015.

The primary factor responsible for the decrease in submissions is that over time, some Council members – either unaware of the provisions of the 1997 presidential note, or unhappy with them – began to contend that assessments must be agreed by consensus. Thus while S/1997/451 clearly stated that assessments were to be prepared by presidencies “under their own responsibility and following consultations with members of the Council”, a few members sought to turn the “consultations” into a no-objection procedure.

As noted in our book (page 445), 

“Because the assessments are prepared by each delegation in its national capacity, they are sometimes more candid and contain more insights into the work of the Council than the Council’s Annual Reports.” 

Over time, these “candid and insightful” contents came to be valued by the wider UN membership as giving a better window into the Council’s work than the Introduction to its Annual Report. It was these same two qualities, however, which began to create difficulties with some Council members. As certain substantive issues before the Council became more divisive, a few members (including, but not limited to, some P5) began forcefully objecting to certain passages in draft assessments. In such situations, some presidency delegations decided to compromise and to revise the language at issue. Others, however, did not want to include in their national assessments a perspective not their own. But neither did they want to have a falling-out with another Council member over a somewhat secondary aspect of the Council’s work. Consequently, in some cases where objections were raised, delegations simply withdrew their drafts rather than publishing them. Still other delegations, having witnessed challenges to their fellow members’ assessments, decided to forgo potential disputes by not preparing a draft at all. 

Nonetheless, after the low point of 2016, momentum began to build again for drafting and publishing assessments. Some members still do not publish until they have obtained consensus. But others have become determined to exercise their right to publish a document in their national capacity irrespective of any objections. In this context, in recent years a number of Council members have issued their presidency assessment under a cover letter which underscores that it is not a consensus document. In some cases, such letters have used language close to that in the 1997 presidential note. For example, the cover letter to Ghana’s assessment for its November 2022 presidency states: “While other members of the Council have been consulted, the assessment should not be considered as representing the views of the Council.” And the letters of Malta, Switzerland and the United Kingdom – for their respective presidencies of February, May and July 2023 – each state categorically that their assessment “should not be considered a consensus document”.

When assessments are not published, this does not only lessen the amount of information available from Council members’ vantage points. It also deprives the delegation drafting the Annual Report Introduction of important building blocks. In fact, the connection between the monthly assessments and the Introduction came to be explicitly mentioned in presidential notes beginning in 2010. The most recent comprehensive presidential note on working methods, S/2017/507, states:

“The members of the Security Council recognize the value of a monthly assessment of each presidency in providing as much information as possible on the main aspects of the work of the Council during that month, which can be useful in the preparation of the annual report.” (our emphasis)

When the General Assembly met on 30 June 2023 to consider the Council’s 2022 Annual Report, several Member States raised concerns about the presidency assessments. The Portuguese representative, speaking on behalf of the Accountability, Coherence and Transparency (ACT) group, stressed that assessments represented the views of each presidency, not those of the Council as a whole, and that therefore their substance “should not be reduced to the lowest common denominator.” Speaking on behalf of the Nordic States, the representative of Norway (which had just completed a 2021-2022 term on the Council) argued that in the absence of “a more complete, substantive and analytical” Annual Report, the monthly assessments were “a valuable way to provide a more analytical look at the Council’s work”. She, too, underscored that “monthly assessments do not have to be agreed by consensus”, and added that “Greater recognition of that fact may help assessments to be completed sooner”. Liechtenstein’s representative also emphasized that assessments do not require unanimity “and therefore offer a rare and important opportunity for analysis of the work in the Council.” The Estonian representative noted that his country’s experience as a Council member from 2020-2021 “was that our efforts to move towards further transparency”, including through “the drafting of monthly assessments, were met with a certain resistance.” Noting the lack of assessments for 2023, he underscored that “Monthly assessments are an excellent tool for shedding light on Council dynamics, which often get watered down during the drafting of the official report.”

In the same debate, the representative of Singapore noted that the Annual Report Introduction stated that “Further information on the work of the Council and more detailed reports of its meetings can be found in the monthly assessments”. And yet, a number of assessments were still not available. He continued,

“To put it bluntly, as members of the Assembly we have the right and the responsibility to ask all Council members to submit their monthly assessment report, because those reports are useful to the wider membership, especially the smaller States and smaller missions, as a way of following the work of the Council. They form an important and regular means of providing transparency and accountability to the work of the Council.”

He added that there apparently was a “a structural problem or perhaps even a political problem” and called upon the Security Council President “to address that issue with seriousness and urgency” and that it be explicitly addressed in the 2023 Annual Report.

Neither the Russian Federation nor the United States has ever explained why they have discontinued the submission of assessments, which is in stark contrast to earlier years when they each consistently participated. At the 2023 Assembly meeting, Singapore’s representative spoke to this issue. He noted that two permanent members had failed to publish their assessments in 2022, and added, “I find it deeply disappointing that some permanent members do not show any sense of responsibility with regard to submitting those reports.”

At one point, it was thought that perhaps the decline in assessments was attributable to the Council’s heavy workload, with many delegations’ personnel stretched thin. According to this line of reasoning, it was possible that some delegations had decided to concentrate their limited resources on matters directly connected to the Council’s work. However, from 2020 through 2022, four out of the five Council members which have failed to publish assessments have been those with amply sized delegations: two P5 (the Russian Federation and the United States) and two E10 (India and South Africa). With respect to these two P5, Singapore’s representative commented, “We do not understand why the permanent members, with all the resources and personnel at their disposal, are unable to prepare and finalize their monthly reports”.

While it is encouraging that there appears to be a renewed commitment among many Council members to resume the regular issuance of assessments, ongoing delays in their publication – often still owing to objections raised by other Council members – undercut their value. It is clear that interest in these assessments diminishes the further removed in time they are from the relevant presidency. Delayed assessments also may mean that they are published too late to be of use to the Council member responsible for drafting the Introduction to the Annual Report. For these reasons, it had been proposed in the Council’s Informal Working Group on Documentation and Other Procedural Questions (IWG) that the Council set a target date of no later than two months after the end of a presidency. However, deciding on a specific timeframe for assessments has not yet gained sufficient traction.

Overall, it is a positive trend that many Council members are recommitting to publishing assessments. It is hoped that this momentum will increase, and will also result in greater timeliness. It is also hoped that the Russian Federation and the United States will resume their participation, making the publication of assessments once again universal. It is clear that advocacy to this end will continue among both Council members themselves, and the wider UN membership.

Below are a Table and Chart of monthly assessments.

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(This update supplements pages 124 and 445 of the book.)

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