October 17 (SeeNews) - The United Nations (UN) General Assembly said on Wednesday it elected Croatia and four other countries as non-permanent members of the UN Security Council for a two-year term starting on January 1, 2008.
This is Croatia’s first ever non-permanent membership in the UN Security Council.
Besides Croatia, the UN General Assembly elected late on Tuesday Burkina Faso, Costa Rica, Libya and Vietnam as Security Council non-permanent members, it said in a statement.
The seats of the non-permanent members are allocated along geographical lines. This time three seats were reserved for African and Asian countries, one for an eastern European state, and one for a country in the Latin American and Caribbean region.
For the seat of the eastern European region, European Union (EU) aspirant Croatia competed with the Czech Republic.
“In the Eastern European category, where 124 votes were needed for a victory in the third round of balloting, Croatia received 184 and the Czech Republic – which withdrew its declared candidacy after two rounds – picked up one”, the statement said.
The Czech Republic was a non-permanent member of the Security Council in the 1994-1995 period.
The council’s five other non-permanent members, whose terms end on December 31, 2008, are Belgium, Indonesia, Italy, Panama and South Africa. The five permanent members are China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Croatia started membership talks with the EU in October 2005, and hopes to join the bloc by the end of the decade.