S/PV.6088
6088th meeting
Friday, 27 February 2009, 10 a.m.
New York
Briefing by the Chairperson-in-Office of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe
Mr. Dabbashi (Libyan Arab Jamahiriya) (spoke in Arabic): At the outset, I would like to welcome Her Excellency the Minister for Foreign Affairs of Greece and to thank her for her update on the work of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and on the priorities that organization will pursue under the chairmanship of Greece. We wish Greece every success in conducting the affairs of the OSCE in the coming months.
What I have to say in no way belittles the importance and value of the briefing just made by the Foreign Minister of Greece. However, I would like to put on the record that this is the second time that we have heard a representative of the OSCE in an official meeting in the course of four months.
The OSCE, as we all know, is a regional arrangement under Chapter VIII of the Charter of the United Nations, as mentioned by the Minister. In that respect, it is no different from a number of other regional organizations. Yet in the course of this month the Council refused to respond to requests by two other regional organizations, the League of Arab States and the African Union, to make their voices heard before the Council. After prolonged discussion, and after insistence by some members of the Council, we were able to hear representatives of those two organizations in informal meetings, of which no record exists.
My delegation — and I believe that my colleagues from Burkina Faso and Uganda share this view — would therefore like to put on record our hope that the Council’s double standard in dealing with regional organizations will come to an end. We also hope that in the future the Council will be prepared to hear all regional organizations in official meetings — in particular those organizations that are inextricably linked with the United Nations in the field of the maintenance of international peace and security, such as the African Union.
Mr. Dabbashi (Libyan Arab Jamahiriya) (spoke in Arabic): I should like to thank my friend, the representative of France, for his second statement emphasizing the need for cooperation between the Council and regional organizations. However, I do not wish to enter into a public debate on all the issues he raised. Many of those issues made perfect sense to me, but we differ on certain others concerning which I do not want to enter into a public debate.
I wish merely to say that, in the future, when a regional organization asks to brief the Security Council, I hope that the Council will accept and respond to that range of issues or to a specific case of such importance to that regional organization that the Council is called on to consider it carefully and act on it. That is all I wished to stress, and I hope that there will be consensus in the future among all members of the Council.
Not all members of the Council have been opposed to such briefings in the past. Only some have objected, and we hope that in the future no member will raise such an objection.
