Come October, Australia will be competing with Finland and Luxembourg for two of this year's five elected two-year seats on the U.N. Security Council. Why against Finland and Luxembourg and not others also contesting for the total of five seats up for grabs? Well might you ask.
Most public debate on U.N. structural reform is focused on the Security Council. Arguably, an even greater historical anomaly is its system of regional groupings that shapes so many U.N. entities and activities. The founders of the U.N. system believed they were providing fair opportunity for interested members to share in the system's management through periodic election to key decision-making bodies, particularly the Security Council and the Economic and Social Council.
To this end, they divided the U.N.'s original 51 members into regional groups. The current 193 members are divided into five groups as follows: Africa (54 members), Asia (53), Latin America and the Caribbean (33), Western Europe and Others (WEO, 29), and Eastern Europe (23).