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Research dossier · History & Society

1999 United Nations Security Council election

election to the United Nations Security Council

Layered newspapers, civic records and oral-history reels arranged as chronological evidence
History and societyInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 31, 2026
Entity authorityQ4128635 ↗
Source-derived summary

The 1999 United Nations Security Council election was held on 14 October 1999 during the Fifty-fourth session of the United Nations General Assembly, held at United Nations Headquarters in New York City. The General Assembly elected Bangladesh, Jamaica, Mali, Tunisia, and Ukraine, as the five new non-permanent members of the UN Security Council for two-year mandates commencing on 1 January 2000. Notably, Ukraine was elected to the Council for the first time as an independent nation.

Rules

The Security Council has 15 seats, filled by five permanent members and ten non-permanent members. Each year, half of the non-permanent members are elected for two-year terms. A sitting member may not immediately run for re-election.

In accordance with the rules whereby the ten non-permanent UNSC seats rotate among the various regional blocs into which UN member states traditionally divide themselves for voting and representation purposes, the five available seats are allocated as follows:

Two for African countries (held by Gabon and the Gambia), with one of them being the "Arab swing seat"

One for countries from the Asian Group (now the Asia-Pacific Group) (held by Bahrain)

One for Latin America and the Caribbean (held by Brazil)

One for the Eastern European Group (held by Slovenia)

To be elected, a candidate must receive a two-thirds majority of those present and voting. If the vote is inconclusive after the first round, three rounds of restricted voting shall take place, followed by three rounds of unrestricted voting, and so on, until a result has been obtained. In restricted voting, only official candidates may be voted on, while in unrestricted voting, any member of the given regional group, with the exception of current Council members, may be voted on.

Candidatures

Prior to the vote, the President of the General Assembly, Mr.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “1999 United Nations Security Council election” as election to the United Nations Security Council. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA useful synthesis for locating the documentary relationships between formal authority, participants and affected communities. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1999, 2000—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. The account is most persuasive where United, Nations and Security can be independently traced.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as election to the United Nations Security Council. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4128635. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1999 and 2000.

Critical limits

Official terminology may obscure informal participation, dissent or communities documented only indirectly. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.

Best used for
  • Event chronology
  • Institutional context
  • Locating named record creators
Verify next

Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “1999 United Nations Security Council election”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow 1999 United Nations Security Council election primary sources, 1999 United Nations Security Council election archive and United research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “1999 United Nations Security Council election”?
  2. Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
  3. Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “1999 United Nations Security Council election” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.