Between 5 and 8 June, Russian strikes on Ukraine killed at least 30 civilians and injured over 200. The United Nations (UN) Security Council held an emergency session, where the acting UN humanitarian chief urged members not to allow this level of civilian harm to become normalised. But Russia blocked any meaningful response.

Just days before, on 3 June, the UN General Assembly had elected five new non-permanent members to sit on the Council from January 2027. While diplomats cast their votes, the body whose seats they were filling remained paralysed by the veto power of its five permanent members.

The Security Council is the UN’s most powerful body. It has the authority to intervene militarily, impose sanctions, refer cases to the International Criminal Court and establish peacekeeping missions. It has the decisive say in choosing the UN secretary-general. Unlike the General Assembly, where all 193 member states have a vote, it has just 15 members. Ten are elected in staggered elections for two-year terms, while five – China, France, Russia, the UK and the USA – are permanent members with veto power. A single veto can block any resolution, regardless of how much global support it has.

The Council was deliberately designed this way. In 1945, the Second World War’s victorious powers were asked to join and fund an institution that could, in principle, authorise collective action against them. The veto was the price of their participation, a bargain designed to keep the strongest states within a legal framework. But the cost has been to allow states with vetoes to play by their own rules.

The veto is a guarantee of impunity, because it means permanent members can violate the UN Charter and block its enforcement. Russia has done this since February 2022, vetoing every meaningful Security Council resolution in response to its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The USA routinely vetoes action on Gaza. The Council only managed to pass a watered-down ceasefire resolution, Resolution 2,728, 171 days into Israel’s assault, by which time over 10,000 people had been killed.

Competition and accountability

Council members are expected to uphold the UN Charter’s principles, which means ensuring civilian protection and holding perpetrators of atrocities accountable. Yet the process by which non-permanent members are chosen undermines accountability.

Elections are often settled before they happen. Typically, within each of the UN’s five regional blocs, candidates are identified, rivals stand aside and the General Assembly, required to confirm appointments by a two-thirds vote, rubber-stamps what has already been agreed in closed negotiations. This denies civil society the opportunity to scrutinise candidates and hold them to account for their human rights record.

The process was better this time around. Only two of five seats were uncontested, with Trinidad and Tobago being the sole Latin American and Caribbean candidate and Zimbabwe standing unopposed among African states. Competitive races occurred in the Asia-Pacific and Western European and Other States groups.

When there’s competition, results can be more meaningful. In the Asia-Pacific group, Kyrgyzstan defeated the Philippines by 142 votes to 49, taking a seat for the first time since joining the UN in 1992. In the Western European and other States group, Austria and Portugal were elected while Germany missed out. This was a shock for a country that had held a non-permanent seat on a roughly eight-year cycle since 1987 and hopes for a permanent seat on a reformed Council.

Because Council seats are distributed among regional blocs on a predictable rotational cycle, states can calculate years in advance when a slot will become available and work long term to cultivate diplomatic support across the General Assembly. Austria formally declared its candidacy in 2011, and Portugal did so in 2013, both targeting the seats coming up for election in 2026. Germany announced its candidacy only in 2019 and ran a slow and half-hearted campaign.

Germany’s foreign policy positions, particularly its staunch support for Israel, may have also counted against it. Since the start of the current phase of conflict in October 2023, the German government has repeatedly abstained on General Assembly resolutions calling for ceasefires, voting in favour only after tens of thousands of Palestinians had been killed. It has also been conspicuously reluctant to challenge the Trump administration’s violations of international norms, including military strikes on Iran and Venezuela. It recently slashed its development aid. The competitive election encouraged scrutiny of states’ multilateral records, and evidently many weren’t impressed by Germany’s.

Austria and Portugal built their campaigns on the opposite ground. Austria emphasised its history of military neutrality as a basis for bridge-building in a polarised international environment, and Portugal pointed to its consistent adherence to international law and role in early conflict prevention. Both called for the UN Charter’s principles to be upheld, from Gaza to Sudan to Ukraine.

Commitments on paper

When Austria and Portugal take their seats, the number of Friends of the Responsibility to Protect on the Council – states that have made a formal commitment to prevent atrocities – will climb from five to seven. In addition, all five incoming members have signed, if not all ratified, the core instruments of international humanitarian law, including the Genocide Convention and the Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court.

Beyond that baseline, however, their commitments diverge significantly. Austria and Portugal have signed both the France/Mexico initiative for voluntary veto restraint, which calls on permanent members to refrain from using vetoes in cases of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, and the ACT Code of Conduct, a pledge under which Council members commit not to vote against credible draft resolutions aimed at preventing mass atrocities. Trinidad and Tobago has signed the ACT Code of Conduct but not the veto restraint initiative, while Kyrgyzstan and Zimbabwe have signed neither.

These distinctions broadly signal how each incoming member is likely to behave. Civil society will be closely scrutinising state behaviour, and specifically whether members push for accountability, build coalitions to protect civilians and make the case for structural reform.

A paralysed body

In February, Hala Alkarib, Regional Director of the Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa, a civil society organisation, addressed the Council on Sudan for the third time. In 2021, she warned of the fragility of Sudan’s democratic transition. In 2023 she alerted the Council to the risk of genocide. This time, she reported that every threshold, including siege, forced displacement, man-made famine and mass rape, had been crossed. She made it clear that her being there for the third time was an indictment of the Council’s inability to act. And no action followed.

In Afghanistan, 21.9 million people need humanitarian assistance. Around 3.8 million girls aged seven to 18 are out of school, and some 250,000 more are permanently excluded from education each year. Since regaining power in August 2021, the Taliban have issued over 230 decrees that have dismantled women’s rights across every domain of life. A civil society witness told the Council that the regime has even criminalised women’s faces and voices. But words have been the Council’s only response. Resolution 2,681 of 2023 unanimously condemned the Taliban’s ban on Afghan women working for the UN and demanded a reversal of all restrictions on women’s rights. The Taliban ignored it. The Council has the authority to impose sanctions and take further measures, but hasn’t done so.

Since 2005, the Council has adopted 99 resolutions and 17 presidential statements referencing the Responsibility to Protect, but has still failed to act consistently on atrocities in Gaza, Myanmar, Sudan and Syria, among others.

Dysfunction extends to basic procedure. In June, the Council was unable to agree its work programme for the month, after China and Russia objected to a briefing of the Iran sanctions committee over Iran’s non-compliance with its nuclear commitments. It was an example of how far geopolitical polarisation has degraded the most basic institutional functioning.

Structural reform needed

Since the UN was founded, its member states have quadrupled in number, and the global population has grown from 2.5 to eight billion. Yet the permanent five remain unchanged. Africa’s 54 countries, almost all of which were under colonial rule in 1945, account for roughly 25 per cent of UN membership but hold no permanent Council seat. Neither do Latin America and the Caribbean, nor India, home to 1.4 billion people.

Several competing proposals show what change might look like. The African Union’s Ezulwini Consensus calls for expansion to 26 members, with Africa holding two permanent seats with full veto rights, plus five non-permanent seats. The G4, made up of Brazil, Germany, India and Japan, proposes adding six permanent seats with veto powers granted after a review period. The Uniting for Consensus group, led by Italy, opposes new permanent seats, arguing this would only entrench oligarchy, and instead proposes longer rotating terms.

Among the permanent five, France and the UK support expansion with veto powers for new members, while the USA supports two African seats but without vetoes. China backs African representation but opposes Japan’s membership, and Russia says it supports reform in principle but opposes anything that would dilute its influence.

These divisions reflect self-interest more than principles, and the effect is that no expansion proposal has ever cleared the bar for Charter amendment, which requires a two-thirds General Assembly vote, ratification by two-thirds of states and unanimous approval from all five permanent members.

Council expansion would address representation but not the body’s paralysis. Even a reformed and more representative Council would remain deadlocked if veto powers survive intact. Handing out vetoes to more states would multiply the potential blocks on action.

Short of Charter amendment, a more modest path runs through the France/Mexico initiative for voluntary veto restraint in mass atrocity situations, now signed by over 100 states, and the ACT Code of Conduct, signed by 121. General Assembly Resolution 76/262 mandates a debate whenever a veto is cast, raising the political cost of its use. Resolution 377 allows the General Assembly to recommend collective measures when the Council is deadlocked. None of these mechanisms eliminates the veto problem, but they all raise its political cost, even if the current Russian and US governments seem immune to international shame.

Civil society: present but powerless

The election process also showed who has a voice in the process, and who doesn’t. Even when they’re competitive, Council elections take place entirely through closed diplomatic channels. Civil society has no formal role in scrutinising candidates or holding them to account for their record as members. Within the Council, there’s no permanent or guaranteed civil society access even in its most basic forms, such as guaranteed briefing slots, formal consultation mechanisms or the right to address the Council without depending on an invitation from one of its members. The occasional invitation to speak, which can be withdrawn at any time, is the only channel through which frontline voices can reach the highest table of international decision-making. Any meaningful structural reform must include guaranteed and expanded civil society access.

Incoming members will take their seats against a backdrop of protracted conflicts, a deepening UN funding crisis and geopolitical divisions that show no sign of easing. Austria and Portugal bring stronger formal commitments to atrocity prevention than most. Kyrgyzstan provides a Central Asian voice absent from the Council for almost a decade, while Zimbabwe offers perspectives from a continent that remains without permanent representation and Trinidad and Tobago brings small-island-state insights rarely heard at the Council table. At the same time, Kyrgyzstan and Zimbabwe both repress civic space at home, and states that deny civil society voices at the domestic level invariably also oppose them in multilateral spaces.

But no membership renewal can resolve the fundamental problem, which is that the Council’s most consequential decisions rest with five states with no intention of relinquishing their privilege. A body designed to prevent wars between great powers now operates in a world where great powers are among the primary agents of violence and impunity. Elected members should push for accountability, raise the political costs of veto use and bring civil society voices into the room. But the contradiction built into the Council’s foundations will only be resolved by structural reform, and that will only come when the states that benefit most from the status quo wake up to the reality that more of the same means a world of increasing conflict and chaos.

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