3min chapter

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Negotiating Aid and Diplomacy: Syria's cross border aid at the UN Security Council

The New Arab Voice

CHAPTER

How to Reform the UN Security Council

Reforming the UN charter is an exceptionally difficult process in procedural and political terms. For the time being, at least the veto is here to stay. The debate shifts away from the veto and it shifts on who should have permanent seats. But there is a chance that if reforms are not made, the security council could find itself becoming less relevant.

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Speaker 1
I
Speaker 2
mean, at a technical level, it is very, very hard to put constraints on the veto because it's something which is embedded in the UN charter. The reforming the UN charter is an exceptionally difficult process in procedural and political terms. For the time being, at least the veto is here to stay. So to some extent, the veto is a safety valve that means that the big powers feel that they can stay in this system and defend their interests. I and I think most UN watchers would be the first to admit that seen from the outside, this seems like a very, very perverse mechanism and it's a mechanism that allows the US to invade Iraq without having resolutions targeting it or similarly to Russia to behave in a pretty dreadful way, an absolutely dreadful way towards Ukraine without absorbing penalties.
Speaker 1
Maybe they can't or won't make changes to the veto, but there have been other suggestions for reforms.
Speaker 2
Other countries such as India and Brazil step up and say the real issue is not the veto. It's the fact that the Security Council is not representative of the world order as it is today. Britain and France, too much reduced powers, continue to have permanent seats. India, Brazil, Japan, Nigeria, do not. And so for that group of countries, the real question is how do you change the membership of the council? And so the debate shifts away from the veto and it shifts on to who should have permanent seats. And then that creates all sorts of knock on arguments about who represents which regions and so on and so forth. So the debate gets complicated very, very quickly. At the end of the day, you cannot have any council reform without two thirds of the members of the UN ratifying it and all the five permanent members ratifying it. So I mean, that's a very, very high set of bars to jump. Even if the US could find a formula that it liked, it would need to convince China and Russia that it was a good formula for them to. So I think we're going to be talking about reform a lot. I think we have to recognize that the chances are that reform won't be possible. And so I think you're then left with a question which is, can we continue to make the best of this deeply imperfect body, especially at a moment when one of the veto powers Russia is locked in a sort of massive confrontation with three of the
Speaker 1
others, the US, UK and France. Any reforms to either the security council or the veto would be an incredibly steep hill to climb. But there is a chance that if reforms are not made, the security council could find itself
Speaker 2
becoming less relevant.

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