UN Security Council goes to Skåne, Sweden

Today the UN Secretary-General António Guterres and UN ambassadors from the 15 member states of the UN Security Council arrives to my home region Skåne in Sweden for a work meeting at former Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld’s house Backåkra, just a few kilometers from my home.

Dag Hammarskjöld was appointed UN Secretary General in 1953. He bought the property Backåkra in 1957 and was planning to settle there after completion of the mission in the United Nations, but it did not happen since he died in an air crash in Ndola, present Zambia in 1961.

It is the first time in history that a UN Security Council meeting is held outside the UN building in New York. It is done as a tribute to a legendary leader and one of the most popular Secretary Generals ever, Dag Hammarskjöld.

The UN Security Council has fifteen members. Five of them are permanent members: France, China, Russia, Great Britain and the United States.

Then there are ten non-permanent members who are elected five at a time every two years.

These are reserved for the period 1 January 2017 to 31 December 2018: Bolivia, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, the Netherlands and Sweden These are reserved for the period 1 January 2018 to 31 December 2019: Equatorial Guinea, Ivory Coast, Kuwait, Peru and Poland.

The Security Council is one of the UN’s six main bodies. The other five are the General Assembly, the Economic and Social Council, the Secretariat, the International Court and the Trusteeship Council. The latter, however, has been resting since 1994.