The three members of the Bosnia and Herzegovina Joint Presidency held their first meeting with the 15 Security Council members on November 15, when the Council convened a formal meeting on the latest developments in an effort to promote the peace process in the Balkan country, a UN spokesman said.

Fred Eckhard, the UN spokesman, told a press conference that "the meeting is the first time that all the three members of the Joint Presidency met with the Security Council together" since the 1995 establishment of the Joint Presidency under the Dayton Peace Accords, signed in the Ohio State, the United States.

The meeting took place on the eve of the fourth anniversary of the Dayton Peace Accords, which guide the peace process in the Balkan country.

The Bosnian Joint Presidency released a "New York Declaration" here, saying that the presidency "reaffirmed their commitment to the Dayton Accords."

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who is in China on a four-day visit, met with the three Presidency members when he was visiting Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia, in October.

In November 1995, US mediators brought Muslim, Serb and Croatian negotiators to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton to press for an end to the three-year war in the former Yugoslavia area.