How to cite this journal: Author, Date of the post, WMO Conflict Insight, Title of the post, ISSN: 2628 6998, https://worldmediation.org/journal/
ABSTRACT *
This short article examines the contradiction at the centre of the United Nations Security Council. Beginning from the Charter’s stated purpose of saving succeeding generations from the scourge of war, the author sets out the powers conferred on the Council under Chapter VII, including the determination of threats to the peace, the mediation of disputes and the authorisation of force. Against this the author places the conduct of three of the five permanent members: the pressure exerted by China on Taiwan, the invasion of Iraq by the United States in 2003, and the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation in 2022. The failure of the Council to adopt a resolution on Ukraine in February 2022, defeated by the veto of the state whose conduct was at issue, is presented as the clearest expression of the problem: the body charged with preventing aggression is constituted so that its most powerful members cannot be held to account by it.
Editorial note: the assessment of the states discussed reflects the author’s own perspective. This journal’s editorial position is neutral. *
KEYWORDS *
United Nations, Security Council, veto, permanent members, Chapter VII, aggression, Ukraine, Iraq, Taiwan, accountability, institutional reform, international order
INTRODUCTION
The establishment of the United Nations by the United States, Europe, and other allies after the Second World War was intended to enhance international diplomacy (Simonoff 2012). The preamble of the UN Charter indicates the intention of the organization to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” The First and the Second World Wars were captured therein as having “twice in our lifetime brought untold sorrow to mankind”.
Chapter III, Article 7 of the Charter establishes the principal organs of the UN as the General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council, the Trusteeship Council, the International Court of Justice, and the Secretariat.
MAIN CORPUS
The Security Council is the most powerful organ of the UN. Its powers and functions span the whole Charter. Chapter VII, Article 39 gives the Security Council the power to determine the existence of a threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression. Article 40 allows the Council to call upon parties to comply with provisional measures, and Article 42 gives the Council the power to authorise the use of force to maintain international peace and security when necessary.
However, the UN Charter encourages all its member states to settle their disputes peacefully and to refrain from the use of force. Its members must also respect the sovereignty of all member states. Simonoff, a legal adviser to the US mission to the United Nations, speaking at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics, praised the work done by the UN since its inception. He highlighted the following:
The maintaining of international peace through the averting of war.
The development of friendly relations among nations.
The achievement of international cooperation.
The decisions of the Security Council are legally binding on member states. The Security Council has the power to impose sanctions on states. Sanctions have been imposed on countries like North Korea and Iran. Some of these are examples of the exercise of the powers of the permanent members of the UN Security Council, whose main task is to keep world peace.
The Security Council consists of 15 members who have one vote each. Among the 15 states are the five permanent members: China, France, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the United States of America. The permanent members were the major allies and victors of the Second World War. These members are supposed to be the peacekeeping champions of the world. They are the international peacekeeping giants.
However, “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” (Lord Acton, 19th century). The giants are at it.
China has consistently pressured Taiwan, declaring the government and its elections illegitimate, and has not ruled out the use of non-peaceful means.
The United States invaded Iraq on 19 March 2003, alleging that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, an allegation later shown to be unfounded.
On 24 February 2022, Russia invaded the sovereign state of Ukraine.
These three world powers, the United States, Russia, and China, are all permanent members of the UN Security Council. They are the giants of the international community. The Security Council must reach agreement in order to adopt a resolution. On 25 February 2022, the Security Council could not adopt a resolution on the Ukraine crisis, as the Russian Federation exercised a veto. Kyiv’s Permanent Representative told the Council that its words had less value than a hole in a New York pretzel. The draft submitted by Albania and the United States gained the support of 11 members but was vetoed by the Russian Federation, with China, India, and the United Arab Emirates abstaining.
The giants are indeed taking their turns in bullying the peasants. Nobody is about to stop this Russian giant; it is its turn to spit its fire.
SUMMARY *
The article states a structural point in compressed form. The Council was designed on the assumption that the great powers would police the peace, which requires that they not be the ones breaking it. Where a permanent member is itself the party whose conduct is in question, the veto converts the Council from a mechanism of accountability into a guarantee of impunity, and the vote of 25 February 2022 illustrated this without ambiguity: eleven members in favour, one negative vote, and no resolution. The author’s further point is that this is not confined to one state, since each of three permanent members has acted in ways the Charter prohibits, and the arrangement protects all of them equally.
CONCLUSION
The body charged with maintaining international peace and security cannot act against those of its own members most capable of disturbing it. That is the irony the Charter has carried since 1945, and the events of 2022 displayed it more plainly than at any time since the Cold War.
POTENTIAL SOLUTION *
The contradiction the article names is real and it was deliberate, which is the first thing worth establishing. The great powers made their participation conditional on the veto at San Francisco, and the smaller states accepted it because a United Nations containing the great powers and unable to restrain them was judged preferable to a League of Nations that they had left. That bargain is the reason the organisation has survived eighty years while its predecessor lasted twenty, and it is also the reason it cannot do what the author asks of it. Whether the trade was worth making is a genuine question; what is not in doubt is that it was made knowingly.
The reform debate is correspondingly older than most readers assume, and it has produced proposals that are worth naming because they represent what is actually achievable. The initiative on restraint in cases of mass atrocity, supported by well over a hundred states, asks permanent members to undertake voluntarily not to veto where genocide, crimes against humanity or large scale war crimes are at issue. The code of conduct promoted by the Accountability, Coherence and Transparency group runs along similar lines. Neither binds anyone, and both create a cost: a permanent member that vetoes in such a case now does so against a publicly stated standard it has been asked to accept. Formal amendment is a different matter, since Article 108 requires the concurrence of all five permanent members, which means the veto cannot be removed except by those who hold it.
What has developed instead is a set of routes around the Council, and these are the more instructive part of the answer. The General Assembly’s Uniting for Peace procedure, devised in 1950 for exactly this situation, allows the Assembly to meet in emergency session and make recommendations where the Council is deadlocked, and it was used within days in 2022 to adopt a resolution on Ukraine by 141 votes to 5. Its resolutions are not binding, and their value lies elsewhere: they establish where the membership stands, they deny the vetoing state the claim that its conduct is merely contested, and they provide the basis on which other bodies act. The Assembly has since required that any veto be followed automatically by a debate in which the vetoing state explains itself, which is a modest measure and one of the few adopted in decades.
Two further observations belong here. Accountability has migrated toward the courts, which do not depend on the Council: the International Court of Justice has heard proceedings arising from the invasion, the International Criminal Court has issued warrants, and a mechanism has been established to register damage. None of this stops a war, and all of it constrains the range of settlements that will later be available. And the article’s own framing suggests where the leverage sits. If the permanent members cannot be restrained by the Council, the constituency for reform is the rest of the membership, and the pressure available to it is legitimacy: a Council whose composition reflects 1945 and whose decisions are seen as protecting its own members forfeits the authority on which its resolutions depend. That is a slow instrument and it is the one the smaller states actually hold.
Finally, a word about the article’s closing image. It is vivid and it concedes more than the author perhaps intends, since a world in which giants take turns and nobody stops them is one in which the smaller states have no recourse at all. The record does not support quite that much pessimism: the Council has authorised action in a great many cases where no permanent member’s interest was at stake, its sanctions and peacekeeping mandates operate continuously, and the routes described above exist because the deadlock has been worked around before. The honest conclusion is narrower and more useful than despair. The Council cannot restrain its own permanent members, it was never designed to, and everything else it does remains available. Knowing which category a given crisis falls into is what allows the effort to be directed where it can produce something.
* Added by the WMO Editorial Team
REFERENCES
Simonoff, Mark. Diplomacy at the United Nations. 3 December 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXKjJL-Asu8. Accessed 15 September 2024.
United Nations. Charter of the United Nations. https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter. Accessed 25 October 2024.
Supplementary references added by the WMO Editorial Team
Charter of the United Nations, 1945, Articles 2(4), 24, 25, 27, 39 to 42, and 108.
United Nations General Assembly Resolution 377 A (V), Uniting for Peace, 1950.
United Nations General Assembly Resolution ES 11/1 (2022) on the aggression against Ukraine, and Resolution 76/262 (2022) establishing the standing mandate for a debate following the use of the veto.
Security Council draft resolution S/2022/155 of 25 February 2022 and the record of the meeting, S/PV.8979.
Accountability, Coherence and Transparency Group, Code of Conduct regarding Security Council action against genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes, 2015.
France and Mexico, Political Declaration on Suspension of Veto Powers in Cases of Mass Atrocity, 2015.
Report of the High level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change (2004). A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, United Nations, New York, chapter on Security Council reform.
Bosco, D. L. (2009). Five to Rule Them All: The UN Security Council and the Making of the Modern World. Oxford University Press, New York.
