Dubai: For the first time, Saudi Arabia on Thursday has won a seat as a non-permanent member in the U.N. Security Council, Al Arabiya reported.
Saudi Arabia has joined Chad, Chile, Lithuania and Nigeria who took seats in an election. The five new non-permanent members will be replacing Azerbaijan, Guatemala, Morocco, Pakistan and Togo on the 15-member council on January 1 and for the upcoming two years.
While the new five countries were elected unopposed, they still needed approval from two-thirds of the General Assembly to secure their seats.
Al-Riyadh newspaper's Editor-in-chief, Yusuf al-Kuwailet, told Al Arabiya that Saudi Arabia's interfaith dialogue initiative has helped the kingdom to win the seat.
In 2011, Saudi Arabia founded the King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz International Centre for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue, a non-profit and non-governmental organization in Vienna.
Saudi Arabia winning the seat will double kingdom's responsibility towards regional issues especially when it comes to the Syrian conflict, Kuwailet added.
He emphasized that the kingdom will not change its policies towards Syria.
The Security Council's five permanent members, which hold veto power, are the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China.
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