Removing UNSC Members' Veto Power Or Restricting It's Use Will Make Council Effective: Munir Akram

UNITED NATIONS, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 22nd Jan, 2025) Pakistan has proposed scrapping the veto power of the UN Security Council's permanent members or restricting its use "as much as possible" in order to make the 15-member body more effective in dealing with the world's increasingly complex challenges.

"It is the exercise of the veto, or the threat of a veto, which is responsible for the frequent inability of the Security Council to act decisively in response to threats to or breaches of international peace and security," Ambassador Munir Akram, permanent representative of Pakistan to the UN, told delegates when the deadlocked Inter-Governmental Negotiations (IGN) aimed at restructuring the Council resumed on Tuesday.

"Therefore," he added, "to make the Council more effective it is important to either abolish the veto rights of permanent members, or failing this, to restrict its use as much as possible."

In this regard, the Pakistani envoy said that enlarging the veto rights to additional states in an expanded Council could only add to the problem.

This, he said, was one of the reasons that Pakistan and many other Member States have opposed the creation of new “permanent” members on the Security Council.

Full-scale negotiations to reform the Security Council began in the General Assembly in February 2009 on five key areas -- the categories of membership, the question of veto, regional representation, size of an enlarged Security Council, and working methods of the council and its relationship with the General Assembly.

Progress towards reforming the Security Council remains blocked as G-4 countries -- India, Brazil, Germany and Japan -- continue to push for permanent seats in the Council, while the Italy/Pakistan-led Uniting for Consensus (UfC) group opposes any additional permanent members.

As a compromise, UfC has proposed a new category of members -- not permanent members -- with longer duration in terms and a possibility to get re-elected.

The Security Council is currently composed of five permanent members -- Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States -- and 10 non-permanent members elected to two-year terms.

In his remarks, Ambassador Akram backed the demand for addressing the imbalance of influence within the Security Council – between the permanent and non-permanent members.

While supporting proposals to constrain the use of veto in situations of mass atrocities, such as genocide, he said the General Assembly should adopt greater responsibility when the veto is exercised. In this regard, he called for building on Liechtenstein's “veto initiative” by requiring the 193-member Assembly to be obligated to express itself on the issue on which a veto has been exercised.

The influence of the five permanent members, and their proclivity to use the veto could be constrained by the addition of new non-permanent members to the Security Council, Ambassador Akram said.

Apart from the obvious impact of a large number of non-permanent vs. permanent members, the higher majorities required for the adoption of Security Council resolutions would provide the non-permanent members a de facto counter-veto, thus achieving some measure of influence to counter the permanent members' influence.

"Another device to do so, would be legislate that the adoption of resolutions relating to a particular region would require the unanimous support – or 2/3rd majority support – of the Council members belonging to that region," the Pakistani envoy said. Together with a higher number of members from each region, such a requirement would go a long way towards redressing the “historical injustice” against Africa and the regions of the Global South.

"Nor are we averse to according greater rights of approval and disapproval to countries representing their respective regions," Ambassador Akram said. However, he added, such rights cannot be claimed by individual states, merely for their own national interests.

In conclusion, the Pakistani envoy reiterated that the IGN was the sole format to promote the widest possible agreement on Security Council reform.