African members of the Security Council reaffirm Yemen’s sovereignty and warn against regional spillover
Yemen Herald News 
The three African members of the United Nations Security Council have reaffirmed their support for Yemen’s sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity, warning that the country must not be allowed to become a theatre for a broader regional confrontation.
The position was delivered at the Council’s session on Yemen on 13 August by the representative of Liberia, who spoke on behalf of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Somalia as well. He urged the parties to the conflict to move beyond what he called conflict management and towards a decisive political resolution, telling members that “the future of Yemen must be written by Yemeni hands”.
The grouping is known at the United Nations as the A3, an informal caucus through which the African elected members of the Council coordinate a common line. It has no formal standing in the Council’s rules, but a joint statement carries more weight than three separate interventions, and the caucus has become a recognised feature of Council practice on files that touch the continent and its maritime approaches.
Yemen is one of those files, even though it lies on the Arabian side of the water. Somalia sits directly opposite Yemen across the Gulf of Aden, and the Bab al-Mandab Strait forms the hinge between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. Sustained attacks on merchant shipping there have consequences for the ports and economies of the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea littoral, and for Egypt, whose Suez Canal revenues fell sharply after attacks on commercial vessels intensified in late 2023 and pushed carriers to route around the Cape of Good Hope.
The same waters carry one of the world’s most dangerous migration routes. United Nations agencies have documented the movement of large numbers of people from the Horn of Africa across the Gulf of Aden into Yemen in search of work, a journey on which drownings, abuse and detention are routinely reported. A return to full-scale fighting in Yemen would place those travellers, and the Yemeni communities that receive them, under still greater strain.
The A3 statement came during a briefing in which the UN Special Envoy for Yemen, Hans Grundberg, told the Council that the country faces a more serious risk of returning to large-scale conflict than at any point since the truce mediated by the United Nations in 2022. He said the conflict expanding across the Middle East had arrived on Yemen’s shores and that attacks on commercial vessels in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden risked deepening the country’s entanglement with the wider regional confrontation.
Those attacks were not abstract for the members meeting that day. Three days earlier a missile strike near Mokha hit the cargo ship Tihamah as it approached port, killing crew members and rescuers, and the port city itself was struck over consecutive days by missiles and drones. The Secretary-General’s latest report recorded attacks on three vessels in July and early August, and on 20 July the Houthis announced what they described as a naval blockade of Saudi Arabia.
Tom Fletcher, the United Nations Emergency Relief Coordinator, set out the humanitarian backdrop. He told the Council that six million people in Yemen face emergency levels of deprivation, the highest figure anywhere in the world, that nearly eleven million women and girls require humanitarian support, and that authorities in Marib have declared a health emergency in response to a measles outbreak. Humanitarian agencies reached an average of 5.3 million people a month during 2025, he said, but the appeal is now barely a fifth funded.
Grundberg also pressed both sides to de-escalate immediately and work towards a ceasefire, describing economic de-escalation as urgent and saying a resumption of oil exports under appropriate security guarantees would give the country a critical source of income. He repeated the United Nations demand that the Houthis release the 73 UN personnel still arbitrarily detained, along with colleagues from non-governmental organisations, a call the United Kingdom and Latvia both echoed during the session.
Other members focused on the maritime dimension. Greece described the security of navigation in the Red Sea, the Bab al-Mandab and the Gulf of Aden as critically important. Bahrain called for a firm Council stance to protect seafarers. France recalled resolution 2722, adopted in 2024, and said it would remain engaged through the European Union’s Operation Aspides. The United Kingdom pledged continued humanitarian support and pressed Iran to end its backing for the Houthis.
The Council’s divisions surfaced on the question of blame. The United States said the Houthis had targeted more than seven Saudi-linked vessels in recent weeks and argued this showed active cooperation with Tehran, a reading Yemen’s own representative endorsed. Russia’s delegate instead blamed the stagnation of the peace process and a confrontation she said the United States and Israel had initiated, while China argued the Yemeni file could not be separated from the wider regional picture.
Against that argument, the A3 intervention was notable for what it did not do. It assigned no external culprit and made no demand of any capital outside Yemen. Its emphasis on Yemeni ownership echoes a principle the African caucus has applied on its own continent, that durable settlements are the ones the parties themselves negotiate. The session ended without agreement on any new Council measure, which leaves that emphasis as an argument about method rather than a decision with force behind it.
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