Security Council Veto Reform: Avenue for Progress or Dead End?
University of Leeds PhD candidate, Richard Illingworth, discusses the topic of United Nations Security Council veto reform.
The Veto Problem
The veto power held the United Nations (UN) Security Council’s five permanent (P5 – Britain, the United States, France, Russia, and China) members presents one of the greatest institutional barriers to acting on the international community’s Responsibility to Protect (R2P). R2P was unanimously endorsed by the international community at the 2005 UN World Summit. It is a political commitment to protect against four mass atrocity crimes: genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing.
The UN Charter does not directly refer to a veto power as such. Instead, the P5’s veto power is implicitly found in the text of Chapter Five, Article 27 of the Charter, where it states that decisions of the Security Council require ‘the concurring votes of the permanent members’. In other words, if any of the P5 members vote against a draft put before the Security Council, it cannot be passed as a binding resolution.
As the responsibility to react to mass atrocity crimes under R2P in the wake of a government manifestly failing in its duty of protection lies primarily in the hands of the Security Council, R2P and the P5's veto power are clearly two inseparable issues.
However, in spite of the Security Council’s expanded mandate beyond maintaining international peace and security towards the protection of international human rights under commitments like R2P, the veto has remained entirely unchanged since the UN was established in 1945.
In practice this has meant that the UN Security Council has often been unable to live up to international commitments made under R2P. The crisis in Syria has been the most poignant example of this, where the Security Council has seen 14 draft resolutions blocked by use of the veto as of early 2020, with the most recent coming on 20 December 2019.
Syria is not the only example of where the veto has been exercised to block Security Council resolutions over the issue of human protection. The United States (US) has consistently exercised its veto power over the Israel-Palestine conflict, often failing to condemn Israeli breaches of international law regarding violent actions against Palestinian civilians. In 2015, Russia vetoed a draft resolution which sought to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the genocide in Srebrenica; a statement against NATO-led intervention in the region during the 1990s. Further, in February 2019 a joint-veto was exercised by Russia and China over the ongoing situation in Venezuela. These few examples demonstrate how the veto obstructs the Security Council in delivering on its mandate to preserve peace and security in the context of responding to serious breaches of international human rights.
Reasons for Pessimism
In November 2019, Australia’s ambassador to the UN, Mitch Fifield, stated that reform to the UN Security Council has been ‘glacial’ and is ‘well overdue’. The veto power is irreflective of contemporary political realities, neglecting the importance now held by many states outside the P5, including those in Africa, Asia, and South America.
Nevertheless, the veto power remains closely safeguarded by the P5. This has been the case because the veto serves both the P5’s instrumental and normative interests. On the instrumental side, first, the veto power provides the P5 a permanent position of authority within the international community. Even if a P5 member’s material power wanes, the veto ensures that they have an important managerial role to play in decisions taken at the UN level over international peace and security. Second, the veto allows P5 members to safeguard their international interests by blocking Security Council resolutions that they perceive as damaging to themselves. For instance, veto use allows P5 members to protect their close allies, as has been demonstrated by the Syria and Israel examples.
Regarding normative interests, the veto power needs to be understood in relation to the ‘dual responsibility’ held by the Security Council towards both international peace and security, and to international human rights protection such as espoused under R2P. Justin Morris argues that the expansion of the Security Council’s mandate towards the protection of international human rights conflicts directly with the Council’s traditional responsibility to maintaining international peace. In practice this has seen a split within the P5 between Britain, France, and the US, who believe in the application of coercive force to uphold R2P values, and Russia and China who are highly sceptical of the use of coercive force against a sovereign’s will. Consequently, veto use has allowed Russia and China to enforce their preference for upholding state sovereignty and non-intervention.
The combination of these instrumental and normative interests paints a rather bleak picture for the promise of achieving reform to the P5’s veto power.
Reasons for Optimism
Yet this has not meant that avenues of veto reform have gone unexplored. In 1950 the ‘Uniting for Peace’ resolution was adopted by the UN General Assembly, which effectively declares that in the case of a Security Council veto over an issue of international peace and security, the issue can be referred to the General Assembly to be dealt with. Yet this has occurred only 12 times in total, and has not done so since 1997.
In more recent times, the Responsibility Not to Veto movement has called on the P5 to refrain from veto use over cases of mass atrocities where a Council majority would otherwise be possible and the P5’s vital interests are not at stake.
From the RN2V movement has spawned the Accountability, Coherence and Transparency (ACT) Group’s Code of Conduct as well as the separate France-Mexico Initiative for veto restraint. To date, the ACT Code has 117 UN member signatories, whilst the France-Mexico Initiative has 103 signatories.
Neither the ACT Code nor France-Mexico Initiative recommend a formal amendment to the P5’s veto power under the UN Charter. Instead, they are informal reform recommendations, which both recommend that the P5 should simply refrain from exercising a veto when the Security Council votes on issues pertaining to R2P and gross violations of human rights. The large scale support that both measures have obtained in such a relatively short space of time demonstrates that this is a genuine area of concern for the international community, with appetite existing for an R2P norm whose demands are more consistently met. As Bellamy puts it, the push for veto restraint is ‘not idle hope’.
The informal nature of these restraint proposals has attempted to offer a more pragmatic route towards realising veto restraint over cases of R2P concern, as an informal measure would not formally bind the P5 members. Whilst some argue that this may render the measures ineffective, it would at least allow the P5 to see how veto restraint work would work in practice, in the knowledge that they could at any time return to their previous application of veto use. This pragmatic approach may help in providing sceptical P5 members with the assurance needed to adopt either of these measures in the first place.
The ACT Code and France-Mexico Initiative have also attempted to be pragmatic by providing get-out-clauses for the P5. In the case of the ACT Code, only ‘credible’ Security Council draft resolutions are called upon to require veto restraint from the P5, whereas the France-Mexico Initiative allows for veto use to remain over cases of ‘vital national interest’.
Veto Reform Going Forward
Whilst the ACT Code and France-Mexico Initiative have offered some promise for the hope of achieving veto restraint, they are not without flaws. If adopted, the get-out-clauses contained in both may simply permit the status quo to remain in practice. Further, whilst both measures remain connected to the possibility of the Security Council more readily exercising the use of military force under R2P, their feasibility of adoption remains highly unlikely given the instrumental and normative interests of the P5 highlighted above.
Yet perhaps these two measures at least offer something of a stepping-stone towards achieving veto restraint in the long-term. Whilst they have not gained support (and remain unlikely to) from the US, Russia and China, they have been supported by France and the UK as P5 members. Further, the support both measures have garnered from the international community in such a short life-span demonstrates that the issue of veto reform holds normative influence and is not going away anytime soon. In the face of mounting political pressure, it may not be possible for P5 members to ignore calls for veto restraint forever.
This Fresh Perspectives piece will end here by emphasising the difference between impossibility and improbability highlighted by Pablo Gilabert and Holly Lawford-Smith’s discussion of political feasibility. Just because political progress is difficult to achieve does not mean that it cannot be achieved. The barriers to achieving veto restraint are political and ones of choice, and these do not remain static with time.
What is required now is concerted effort to overcome these political barriers. Practical solutions which satisfy deep moral concerns without greatly undermining state interests are needed. What this necessitates is compromise on ideals, yet compromise reflecting progress. The hope of achieving veto restraint is dependent upon just this: finding a compromise on an ideal form of veto practice which can satisfy the interests of all P5 members. This will remain an improbable goal for the foreseeable future, yet it is not an inherently impossible one.
Richard Illingworth is a PhD Candidate at the University of Leeds, UK. His thesis is entitled ‘Towards a Responsibility to Act: Can Transitional Cosmopolitan Reform Save the Responsibility to Protect?’.
Title image: "United Nations Security Council Chamber" by michellerlee is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
If you are interested in submitting a blog post for our Fresh Perspectives series, please contact our editor, Richard Illingworth, by Email (pt17rji@leeds.ac.uk) or Twitter (@RJI95).