271

Australian Delegation, United Nations, to Department of External Affairs

Cablegram UN875 NEW YORK, 2 December 1946, 9.39 p.m.

SECRET

Assembly 314.

1. Sub-Committee of Committee one to discuss veto resolutions met today and elected Denmark to chairmanship. Australia and Cuba opposed a move to meet in private and sessions are proceeding in public.

2. In public session we spoke first to ensure that our resolution be made basis of discussion and announced that while we had no objection to Soviet proposals [1], subject to clarification, we saw no conflict with our own proposals [2] which we maintained.

3. Five-hour session produced new texts from Venezuela, China, France, India and Poland. Soviet expressed readiness to accept part of our fourth paragraph [3] but nothing else. We worked to maintain our text in face of strong tendency to compromise, although United Kingdom, United States, China and France expressed with varying degrees of firmness their acceptance of operative part of our resolution. We are working hard to hold them to this view. If tendency for compromise becomes marked we may have to insist on returning our resolution to Assembly unaltered, and risk losing some of our present majority. There is a strong body of opinion in committee against any implication of blame against the Security Council or Soviet and several proposals have been made to delete our second paragraph.

4. The Philippine proposal [4] has been withdrawn and Cuban resolution [5] looking to revision of Charter will be presented to the committee separately from our resolution.

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1 See Document 269.

2 See Document 253.

3 The paragraph divisions referred to are those of the original draft resolution conveyed in Document 172.

4 See Document 217, paragraph 8.

5 See Document 217, note 5.

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[AA:A1838/2, 852/10/5, i]