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he United Nations commemorates its eighty years this year. Amid the resurgence of wars, humanitarian crises, geopolitical tensions, widening inequalities and a rapidly changing climate, its significance and responsibility as a global body mandated to ensure peace, order and security have become all the more important. Established initially by 51 member states on October 24, 1945, at San Francisco, the world body today has 193 members. The UN was founded on the ideal of internationalism—a political principle that calls for embracing mutual cooperation among states.
Of its six main organs, although the General Assembly is considered the major policymaking and representative arm, the Security Council remains the most significant and powerful organ, given its mandate to impose sanctions and authorise use of force across the international community. The resolutions passed by the Security Council are binding on all member states. The UNSC was envisioned by its founding members as a body that would ensure international peace and security. However, its structure reflects a system skewed by an imbalance of power. It has five permanent members, often referred to as the Permanent Five (P5), and 10 non-permanent members, who are elected for two-year terms. The five permanent members are the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Russia and France.
The permanent members have been given the authority to unilaterally nullify any substantive decision—a power known as the right to veto. According to Article 27(3), “decision of the Security Council in all matters shall be made by an affirmative vote of nine members, including the concurring votes of the permanent member.” It will not be wrong to posit that the veto power was born out of a dilemma confronting the major powers at the time of the UN’s formation: their indispensable role in ensuring the organisation’s success versus their scepticism that their national interests might be compromised. Even though national interests remain central to nation states today, with the advent of various international legal conventions—such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—there has been a growing acknowledgement that certain responsibilities go beyond countries’ borders.
In 1970, the judicial arm of the UN, the International Court of Justice, in one of its landmark judgements, established a concept that eventually gained profound importance in modern International Law: obligation erga omnes (obligation towards all). The ICJ, in a case initiated by Belgium against Spain, established that there are certain obligations which states owe to the international community as a whole. These obligations include outlawing acts of aggression and genocide and protecting basic human rights.
Unfortunately, the UN, whose judicial arm affirmed these very significant universal duties (erga omnes), houses another arm that is criticised for undermining and ignoring these important obligations through the exercise of veto power by its five Permanent Members. This contradiction has been demonstrated repeatedly throughout the history of the UN.
For example, Kashmir, a global flashpoint and home to around 13 million people, has been subjected to extensive human rights abuses by the Indian occupying forces. In March 2025, Volker Turk, the UN high commissioner on human rights, speaking to a meeting of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, expressed concern over the gross violations of human rights in Occupied Jammu and Kashmir. He asserted that the use of “restrictive laws and harassment against human rights defenders and independent journalists in Kashmir were resulting in a diminished civic space.”
The frequent exercise of veto power by the P5 has not only resulted in the selective implementation of international law but also eroded the very essence of global peace, for which the UN was created.
Importantly, most of the resolutions brought before the UNSC, highlighting the deteriorating situation in Kashmir, were repeatedly blocked through the use of veto by major powers. In February 1957, a joint resolution, S/3787, was presented by the US, the UK, Australia, Cuba, and Northern Ireland, proposing demilitarisation in Jammu and Kashmir to ensure an UN-supervised plebiscite. This resolution was vetoed by the USSR. Another resolution, S/10416, presented by the US during the 1971 India-Pakistan war, calling for an immediate ceasefire and troop withdrawal along the India-Pakistan border, was also vetoed by the Soviet Union.
Decades later, the same veto privilege resurfaced in the context of Ukraine. In the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, resolution S/2022/720, presented by the United States and Albania in September 2022, called for the immediate withdrawal of Russian forces from Ukraine and urged all states to refrain from recognising any changes to Ukrainian territory as a consequence of Russia’s invasion. However, the resolution was vetoed by the Russian Federation.
Prior to this, when Russia invaded Crimea in February 2014, it vetoed the resolution S/2014/189 presented jointly by more than forty countries, including the US, the UK, Australia, Canada and Germany, declaring the referendum conducted by the Russian government in Crimea as illegal.
In more recent history, the genocide in Gaza perpetrated by the Zionist regime has become another stark example of the UNSC’s inability to halt gross violations of human rights and the laws of war. Since October 2023, more than 70,000 people in the Gaza Strip are reported to have been killed. The United States, as a permanent member of the UNSC, has vetoed the draft resolution demanding an unconditional and permanent ceasefire in Gaza six times.
Most recently, the resolution, S/2025/583, presented by ten countries, including Pakistan, in September 2025, demanded an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, the release of all hostages and the lifting of restrictions imposed by the Israeli government on humanitarian aid in Gaza. However, the resolution was vetoed by the US. It also vetoed the resolution S/2018/516, presented by Kuwait in 2018 amid the Great March of Return protests in Gaza that killed more than 200 Palestinians.
In 2011, when tensions between Israel and Palestinians surged owing to Israel’s continued expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the US vetoed another resolution presented by more than 50 states highlighting Israeli violations of international law.
The frequent exercise of veto power by the P5 has not only resulted in the selective implementation of international law but also eroded the very essence of global peace, for which the UN was created. Its machinery has grown slow to respond to global emergencies and to ensure the implementation of erga omnes. It has also fostered a system of bandwagoning: a phenomenon where states—especially the weaker ones—try to align themselves with one of the five permanent members of the UNSC to safeguard their own interests, propelling them to veto any resolution that runs counter to those interests.
It is owing to this ineffectiveness of the permanent members of the UN Security Council in ensuring regional and global peace—and in preventing genocidal wars such as the one in Gaza—that discussions have been held on abolishing the veto through amendments to the UN charter. However, the impossibility of achieving this without the consent of powerful states has always rendered the idea perpetually beyond practical realisation. Nonetheless, greater public awareness—particularly among the youth in the US and the Europe—just might generate social global pressure on the UN to reform itself along egalitarian and democratic lines.
Ejaz Hussain has a PhD in political science from Heidelberg University and a postdoc from University of California, Berkeley. He is a DAAD and Fulbright fellow and an associate professor. He can be reached at ejaz.bhattygmail.com.
Malik Mashhood is a graduate teaching associate at the Lahore School of Economics.