United Nations Security Council

The United Nations Security Council is one of the six primary organs of the United Nations and serves as the "executive committee" of sorts, responsible for in-house affairs such as updating the UN charter and admitting new states into the UN General Assembly, as well as passing resolutions binding over all UN member states, establishing peacekeeping operations, enacting international sanctions, and authorizing military action.

The UNSC was formed after World War II when the United Nations itself came into being, and the five primary victorious powers became the five permanent members of the UN Security Council with full veto privileges over any resolution put forth in front of the UNSC. The permanent members of the UNSC are the United States, the United Kingdom, France, China, and Russia. The "power of the veto" in the UNSC has often been used to table issues that the majority of the UN General Assembly agree over. In addition to the five permanent members, the UN Security Council is also composed of another ten members that take turns rotating on the Security Council.

Permanent Five

The UN Permanent Five (often abbreviated P5) is a reference to the five UN member states that have a permanent position on the Security Council, unlike the other ten of the fifteen total members who take turns rotating as additional Security Council members. More importantly, the UN P5 have full veto rights and any one of the five nations can veto any resolution presented to the UN Security Council (not the UN General Assembly) regardless of the number of nations voting in favor. Until 2022, P5 states did not have to even provide a reason for issuing a veto; in 2022 a new UN resolution was passed that required dissenting UNSC P5 nations using their veto to reject a resolution would be required to provide an explanation or rationale for their vote, in an effort to curb overuse of the veto by P5 states — a practice that Algeria, Colombia, Albania, and Ireland officially called an "abuse" of the veto powers.

United States

The United States is the permanent UN Security Council member that has been most often charged with abusing the UNSC veto to prevent resolutions condemning its actions or actions of states in which it has a vested interest — notably and most often, Israel.

Most recently, during the 2023 Israel war on Gaza, the United States thrice vetoed resolutions presented to the UNSC to declare an immediate ceasefire in Gaza in light of the extent of Israel's hostilities, the deaths of thousands, and the complete collapse of the health and humanitarian missions there.

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom takes pride in not having used its UNSC veto since 1989, and typically abstains in cases where it does not agree with a resolution presented to the Security Council.

France

France has a policy of not using its UNSC veto privilege in cases where a "mass atrocity has been ascertained," and has lobbied for the veto privileges of all P5 nations to be modified to reflect such a position. The French definition of "where a mass atrocity has been ascertained" is intended to reflect the definitions of such atrocities as set forth in the 2005 World Summit, the Genocide Convention, and the Rome Statute and it would see the P5 refrain from using the veto in matters of "genocide, crimes against humanity and large-scale war crimes."

Russia

Russia is another P5 member that has often been accused of abusing the veto to prevent resolutions that would condemn its own actions or the actions of its allied states, such as the repeated veto of resolutions condemning the atrocities of Bashar Al-Assad's regime in Syria. Russia also used its veto to override a resolution against the Rohingya Genocide perpetrated by Myanmar.

China

While China did not traditionally invoke its veto rights until 1997, a marked change in its voting patterns on UNSC resolutions can be observed since then, with China often aligning itsefl with Russia to repeatedly veto resolutions condemning the massacres of civilians in Syria by the Assad regime and to veto a resolution condemning the Rohingya Genocide by the Burmese government.