UN GATE / FEDERAL COURT, Aug 30 –
Greece won its Security Council seat for the 2025-2026
term with 182 of 188 votes, a result Foreign Minister
George Gerapetritis called proof of "the significant
capital that Greece has acquired in the international
arena," declaring that "now begins the time of
responsibility."
Greece, he said, "would never engage in a
policy of exchanges, a utilitarian policy — we are
exercising a principled foreign policy."
That principle is now being tested on a
narrow, concrete question, and so far, Greece has not
answered it. As a non-permanent Council member,
Greece's actual influence over the Council's decisions is
real but limited — non-permanent members vote, but only
the five permanent members hold the veto, a distinction
the Council's own straw-poll process for selecting the
next Secretary-General makes visible in a specific way:
ballots for permanent members are color-coded to show
their votes separately from everyone else's.
Greece's vote counts. It does not carry the
weight of a veto-holder's.
What Greece's seat does carry is
visibility, and with it, a choice about how to use it.
Since August, Inner City Press has written repeatedly to
Council members, including Greece, asking a specific
question: will Greece raise, with the UN's Media
Accreditation and Liaison Unit and the Secretary-General's
office, the eight-year, unexplained exclusion of a
journalist who has covered the United Nations since 2005?
The press corps still credentialed inside
UN Headquarters largely just transcribes what Council
members and the Secretariat choose to say, if that (many
are retired, going in only for the UN cocktail circuit).
Inner City Press, banned since 2018,
has instead spent this month asking Council members
directly — under Pakistan's Right of Access to Information
Act, Colombia's transparency law, Denmark's
Offentlighedsloven, and now, under Greece's own Code of
Administrative Procedure — what positions their
governments have taken, and what they have done.
Greece has not yet answered that formal request either.
A government that describes its Council
seat as a matter of principle, not exchange, has an
opportunity here to demonstrate which one this actually
is: continued silence, or an answer. Watch this site.