WASHINGTON, May 18: US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is against giving Germany a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, the Washington Post said on Wednesday. During a recent meeting with leaders of the congressional Task Force on the United Nations, Ms Rice reportedly said “there was a very poor rationale for giving another member of the European Union a permanent seat.”

Observers in Washington say that a US decision to oppose Germany could also hurt India’s effort to join the Security Council as a permanent member because it can derail the move for expanding the UN body. Quoting from a confidential memo summarizing the May 5 meeting, the Post quotes Ms Rice as telling former House speaker Newt Gingrich and former Senate majority leader George J. Mitchell: “In many respects, Europe already had a common foreign policy, and that needed to be taken into account in the Security Council.”

The Bush administration has resolutely refused to say whether it would support Germany’s bid for a permanent seat in the UNSC and Ms Rice sidestepped the question during a trip to Berlin in February, saying that it was important ‘to make sure that the important institutions of the United Nations are reflective of today’s circumstances’.

Germany, along with Japan, India and Brazil, submitted to the UN’s General Assembly a proposal to expand the Security Council by adding six permanent seats and four non-permanent ones. The 15-member council currently has five permanent members — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — who hold the veto power over resolutions.

Ms Rice has supported Japan’s interest in a permanent seat while being vague in public about India and Brazil. In 1995, when Security Council expansion was last seriously considered, the Clinton administration advocated permanent seats for Japan and Germany.

The memo about Ms Rice’s views on Germany’s membership was written by George Ward, executive director of the task force, the Post said. When informed of Ms Rice’s comment, Wolfgang Ischinger, Germany’s ambassador to the US, noted that the United States has not taken an official position. He said the proposal unveiled this week should address Ms Rice’s reported concerns because the overall European representation on the Security Council would drop from its current level of 33 per cent to as low as 20.

Ms Rice at one point in the meeting said one guideline for Security Council restructuring is that ‘no non-democratic state should become a permanent member’, the memo said.

Mr Gingrich is quoted as saying that he doubted serious change would take place unless the current UN leadership was removed, adding that an entire layer of the UN bureaucracy will continue to deteriorate unless it is cut out.