The four countries aspiring to gain a permanent seat on the enlarged Security Council and countries opposed to increasing the council's permanent membership failed on Monday to reach any agreement on how to enlarge the 15-nation council.

Under the auspices of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the ambassadors of Germany, Brazil, Japan and India held a 90-minute dialogue with their counterparts from Pakistan, Italy, South Korea and several other countries, dubbed as the "Uniting for Consensus" movement.

"We still have no consensus as yet," German Gunter Pleuger told reporters after the meeting, which took place at Annan's office in the UN headquarters in New York.

Germany, Brazil, Japan and India, known as G-4, have circulated a draft resolution calling for adding six permanent seats and four non-permanent ones to the council. The group also proposed for a vote on the draft in June by the 191-nation General Assembly.

This is the first time the secretary-general intervened in the increasingly intense debate over the reform of the Security Council, which is currently composed of five permanent members and 10 elected members with two-year terms.

"We support the agreement for continuing consultations and dialogue with a view to reaching the broadest possible agreement," Pakistani Ambassador Munir Akram said. "We understand that while the process of consultations is underway, no precipitative move would be made by either side, to table resolutions or to move to votes."

"We now need to identify areas of convergence, both sides have to demonstrate flexibility, the process of consultations should focus on building on areas of convergence, demonstrating flexibility, with a view to reaching some concrete result which would advance the interests of the entire United Nations' membership," he added.

Akram said the "Uniting for Consensus" movement would present a working paper soon to the General Assembly, which would propose to expand the council's non-permanent seats to 20 and make them all open for re-election.

Pakistan, Italy, South Korea, Argentina, Spain, Algeria and dozens of other countries formed the movement in April, which seeks broad consensus on the Security Council reform and objects to a vote on the issue.

Annan urged the two sides to continue their dialogue and called on them to focus their efforts on those issues where it is easy to get consensus.

"I urged them to continue their dialogue, their consultations, not only on Security Council reform, but on all the other clusters, and urged them to focus their efforts on those clusters where it is relatively easy to get consensus. And then focus on the harder issues," he told reporters.

The two camps held their first dialogue in the presence of General Assembly President Jean Ping on May 9, but the meeting did not achieve any progress.

Source: Xinhua