• Wide and cross-cutting support has emerged in our discussions for the idea of a significantly larger Security Council than the one we have. Efficiency is one of the key goals of the reform. But, as many colleagues pointed out yesterday and today, this goal can be achieved indeed and strengthened through a Council of 25 or more members. • An enlargement of this size would enable us to improve equitable representation for the regional groups, since there is a risk that some will otherwise get more than others. WEOG starts out from a favorable position, and it is hard to imagine that a very limited expansion of the Council (to 20 members, for example) could also envision an increase in WEOG presence. This would be possible, instead, if we were agreeing on a larger number of seats and, as I emphasized during our previous sessions, about creating synergies between WEOG and the Eastern European Group (our proposal envisions, besides an additional seat for the Eastern European Group, as I already stated, a shared WEOG-Eastern European seat). • I take this opportunity to welcome to this negotiation our Indian colleague, Ambassador Puri. Yesterday he observed that unless new national permanent members were created, there would be no real reform of the Security Council. This is a point on which we have strong reservations, like many of our colleagues in this room. Historically, the only Security Council reform thus far enacted was in 1965, primarily to reflect the world emerging from decolonization. That reform involved the addition only of new non-permanent seats. Quite frankly I find it difficult to maintain that it was not a true reform. Support for an enlargement only in non-permanent seats has been an important component of the NAM fall-back position on Security Council reform. My distinguished Indian colleague and I both want the Security Council reform: the problem is that in the vision I have expressed, a true reform of the Security Council can be achieved only through an increase in elective seats. • Some have spoken of the connection of working methods with the issue of expanding the Council. On this, I would like to subscribe to a position which has been emphasized in particular by the Permanent Representative of Lichtenstein: it is frankly very hard to see any logic in the idea that expansion to new national permanent seats is a pre requisite for the improvement of working methods, as some delegations have stated. I would rather say that the opposite is true.
 
• Finally, some colleagues, talking of the connection between size of the Council and efficiency, have referred to Parliaments and other representative bodies in Europe, in the US, in Africa, in Asia, whose members are in the hundreds, if not in the thousands. It is a very important point. And I’d like to recall one more characteristic of the members of these representative and democratic bodies: no one is seated there for ever. They are all subject to periodic election.