UNSC Ceremony for Six New Members Amid 6+ Global Crises, Six Flags at UN

By Matthew Russell Lee, Photos

UNITED NATIONS, January 2 – When the six new members of the UN Security Council came to install their flags in front of the Council on January 2, it was a formal ceremony in contrast to the previous year, when Inner City Press was nearly alone as for example the Bolivian and Kazakhstan flags were unfurled. 

This year Kazakhstan's Kairat Umarov, the Council's president for January, made a speech and welcomed Poland's Joanna Wronecka, Peru's Foreign Minister Ricardo Luna Mendoza, Netherlands' Karel Jan Gustaaf van Oosterom, Kuwait's Mansour Al-Otaibi, Equatorial Guinea's Anatolio Ndong Mba and Cote d'Ivoire's Bernard Tanoh-Boutchoue. 

Will they have better luck than their predecessors, on issues ranging from Yemen to DRC, North Korea and Iran, Syria to Somalia, Cameroon to Nigeria to Haiti? We will cover it. For now, here's a tweeted photo of the new members' ambassadors and staff. 

Back on December 1 the "old" UN Security Council adopted a US-drafted resolution on foreign terrorist fighters on December 21; the afternoon before the Administration held a background press call to promote the draft. Inner City Press asked about safeguards on governments which call their opponents terrorists, as has recently happened for example in Cameroon with the assistance of the UN, whose envoy Francois Fall calls all secessionists “extremists.” An Administration official - Nathan Sales, Ambassador-at-Large and Coordinator for Counterterrorism - said it is a question of concern and that the draft is sprinkled through with references to human rights...