List of members of the United Nations Security Council

Membership of the United Nations Security Council is held by the five permanent members and ten elected, non-permanent members. Being elected requires a two-thirds majority vote from the United Nations General Assembly. Elected members hold their place on the council for a two-year term, with five seats contested in even years and five seats contested in odd years. An outgoing member cannot be immediately re-elected. Elections usually begin in June for a term starting January 1. Because of the two-thirds majority requirement, it is possible for two evenly matched candidates to deadlock with approximately half the vote each, sometimes needing weeks of negotiations to resolve. Non-permanent seats are distributed geographically, with a certain number of seats allocated to each of the five United Nations Regional Groups.

Current membership Permanent members

Non-permanent members

Regional Groups

The ten non-permanent seats have the following distribution:

African Group: 3 members Asia-Pacific Group: 2 members Eastern European Group: 1 member Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC): 2 members Western European and Others Group (WEOG): 2 members In addition, one of the five African/Asian seats is an Arab country, alternating between the two groups. This rule was added in 1967 for it to be applied beginning with 1968.

Electoral timetable

* The representative of Arab nations alternates between these two spaces. The odd/even distribution was effectively decided by the January 1946 and 1965 elections (the first ever election, and the first election after the expansion of seats). For each of the six and four members in the newly created seats, the UN General Assembly voted to grant either a 1-year or 2-year term.

Previous Security Council composition From 1946 to 1965, the Security Council had six non-permanent members. Due to a lack of African and Asian member states, the seats had the following distribution:

Latin America: 2 members Commonwealth of Nations: 1 member Eastern Europe: 1 member Middle East: 1 member Western Europe: 1 member As decolonization increased the number of Asian and African member states without a group, they began to contest other seats: Ivory Coast substituted a member of the Commonwealth in 1964–1965, the Eastern European seat regularly included Asian countries from 1956, Liberia took the place of a Western European country in 1961, and Mali successfully contested the Middle Eastern seat in December 1964 (the Security Council would be expanded before Mali's term began). An amendment to the UN Charter ratified in 1965 increased the number of non-permanent seats to 10, and the Regional Groups were formally applied to the seats. The amendment effectively created three African seats and one Asian seat, if treating the Commonwealth seat as a WEOG seat and the Middle Eastern seat as an Asian seat. (In practice, the Commonwealth seat was by then treated as a de facto African seat.)

Membership by year

Permanent

Non-permanent (1946–1965)

Non-permanent (1966–present) The African Union uses an internal rotation system to distribute seats based on its subregions:

1 odd-year seat alternates between Eastern Africa and Southern Africa (only Eastern Africa prior to the creation of the Southern Africa subregion in 1979) 1 even-year seat is allocated to Western Africa 1 even-year seat alternates between Northern Africa (the Arab nation seat) and Central Africa (with one exception at the beginning in 1966) Aside from the Asia-Pacific Group also allocating an Arab nation seat every four years (in even years not divisible by 4), other regional groups do not have their own subregional rotation systems. The Arab nation seat is starred below. The Western European and Others Group in part contains three caucusing subgroups (Benelux, the Nordic countries, and CANZ), whose candidates informally coordinate with each other. While this has not resulted in a stable rotation system, it effectively guarantees that both seats will never be occupied by a single subgroup at the same time.

List by number of years as Security Council member This list contains the 139 United Nations member states so far elected to the United Nations Security Council, including the five permanent members, all listed by number of years each country has so far spent on the UNSC. Of all the members, 6 have so far ceased to exist, leaving the list with 133 modern nations. These, combined with the 60 modern nations that have never been elected to the UNSC to date (see Non-members, below), make up the 193 current members of the UN. Years on the Security Council, as of 2026, including current year where relevant :

Future membership

UN members that have never been Security Council members This is a list of the 60 member nations that have never been members of the Security Council. The three former UN members that were not elected to the Security Council during their membership are Tanganyika, Zanzibar, and Serbia and Montenegro.

Former UN members that were never UNSC members

See also

United Nations Regional Groups Member states of the United Nations List of members of the United Nations Economic and Social Council List of members of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights

References