THE JERUSALEM POST: The United Nations General Assembly will hold a vote Friday on Iran's request to become temporary member of the organization's Security Council.
Iran may be under three sets of sanctions from the UN Security Council over its nuclear program, but that has not stopped it from campaigning for the temporary membership.
The chances of Iran winning the Asian regional seat against rival Japan in Friday's voting are widely viewed as slim-to-none: Victory would require support from two-thirds of all General Assembly member countries that turn up for the secret ballot.
Yet experts said just being in the race at all may be prize enough for Teheran, which announced its candidacy in September 2007.
"As with many governments, the Iranian government sometimes finds it advantageous to portray itself as an outsider that's challenging the status quo," said Ian Hurd, a political scientist at Northwestern University in Chicago who has written about legitimacy and power on the Security Council.
"They may want to run and lose to keep that outsider status," he said.
Iran, which last sat on the Security Council in 1956, may be the only country to vie for one of the body's 10 rotating seats while under active sanctions. Rwanda already held a seat on the Security Council when genocide erupted there in 1994. Libya, which currently holds a seat, expressed interest but did not make a formal bid until after sanctions linked to the investigation of the 1988 Pan Am jet bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland were lifted in 2003, according to analysts with the Columbia University-affiliated Security Council Report.
UN rules allow any member country to declare its candidacy, but the charter instructs representatives to consider candidates' contribution to the "maintenance of international peace and security." >>> By Allison Hoffman, New York | October 17, 2008
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