Exercise of Veto by P-5 as an obstacle to UNSC's effectiveness

One vote from a fraction of the Security Council's members can stop the other fourteen, and the rest of the world's 193 states, in their tracks. That is the veto, held only by China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States, and it is the single design feature students most often blame, correctly, for the Security Council's failures to act on Syria, on humanitarian crises, and most recently on Palestinian membership of the UN itself.

In two minutes

The veto lets any one of the Security Council's five permanent members block a substantive resolution regardless of how the other fourteen members vote, and it is the most commonly cited obstacle to the Council fulfilling its role as global enforcer.

The rest of this chapter

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