Global Policy Forum

Permanent Representative of New Zealand to the UN

Statement to the General Assembly Working Group on the Security Council

Mr. Chairman

You have asked us in the course of this session to address "in depth" the question of the veto.

From the outset, right back to the discussions in the Singapore Mission in 1993 that led to Resolution 48/26, the question of the veto was clearly one of the issues which gave birth to to this Working Group. Those of us who were present at that time must support you for including this issue on the work of the programme.

The issue is actually a simple one. The overwhelming majority of UN members have strongly expressed their desire for a limitation of the veto. The Non Aligned Movement has proposed that the veto be limited to decisions under Chapter VII of the Charter. Mexico has proposed the necessary drafting amendments. They are perfectly straightforward. The problem is not a technical one. It is a political one. The answer is either yes or no. Either we modernize the Security Council and in the process we adjust Article 27 -- or we do not.

I have expressed the New Zealand position very clearly on previous occasions. Our preferred position would be to go even further than the Non Aligned and to limit the veto, even within Chapter VII, only to decisions affecting the security interests of the state concerned.

But in the spirit of moving away from maximalist positions, we are ready to consider other options and the Non Aligned position is one we could accept as part of an overall package to modernise the Security Council and as a first step down the necessary path of adjusting the veto to modern realities.

But, if we are to modernise the Security Council, then something is required in this area.

Resistance to the veto was in the past and continues to be a defining issue for New Zealand.

We warned in 1945, when five countries carved out entrenched positions of power in the new United Nations Organization, that the veto would undermine the effectiveness of the Organization. And so it proved.

We have reached the 50th Anniversary and we are about to enter a new century and the United Nations' second 50 years. We have begun a process to reform the Security Council. Simply by opening up the questions of composition and related matters, as Resolution 48/26 did, the issue of the allocation of power in the Organization and the regulation of the use of power, also automatically come into the picture.

It is not right to suggest, as one or two have done, that this issue has been raised as a negative tactic. To the contrary, it is a clear, consistent historical concern which we pursue and one which we are confident would bring positive improvement to the Organization.

We believe that this Organization is at a critical turning point. We can either go backward and reinstate the power relationships which prevailed in the early years of this century, in which a few large countries dominated security issues on the basis of their unilateral wishes, or we can begin to adjust the Organization to new realities, to modernise its institutions and the use of power within it, so that the United Nations more closely conforms to modern realities.

What are these new realities which we can now see with 50 years hindsight?

I would suggest that first and foremost among the new realities is a changed map of the world -- the disappearance of empires and colonialism. When the Charter was being written, most of the world was controlled physically, administratively and economically by a small number of colonial and imperial powers. It was hardly surprising that those powers saw the veto in the United Nations as a natural extension of their real physical power. And to some extent also it was understandable that they felt the need of the veto at that time. We have to remember and appreciate that at that time they were still engaged in the Second World War -- a titanic struggle against truly evil forces.

Fifty years on, despite our current problems, the world is vastly different. The map has changed drastically. The communist empire that was the Soviet Union is gone. Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, the Pacific are now almost completely free of colonialism.

We now have a United Nations which reflects more accurately the people of the world, a United Nations in which "we the people" are much more equally represented. We have a real international community. And many of the new members of this international community have not only established their sovereignty and independence, but also have become dynamic producers, traders and centres of economic and financial strength.

Mr. Chairman, this is the second new reality. Not only have the colours of the map and the constitutional realities changed but also the economic realities. These days the key words in international trade and finance are -- open markets, free trade, liberalization and interdependence.

Mr. Chairman, I think we need to lift this discussion out of the mental prison which has captured us in these rooms and face what is really happening in the world. The economic domination which a few countries exercised in 1945 has withered. Their economies are no longer self sufficient. Indeed, they are the first to argue, and our colleagues in Geneva are extremely conscious of this, the compelling political and economic trade realities that flow from this global interdependence.

And now, Mr. Chairman, a third reality. I think we all have to be honest. With only one exception, what is true economically is true also in the military sense. The days of European gunboat diplomacy have gone. And while unilateral intervention has not disappeared completely, most of the current veto holders no longer have the capacity for what was commonplace 100 years ago. Today global military reach is effectively only within the capacity of one of the veto holders. And the thought that any new permanent members might be justified on the basis of global reach totally stretches credibility.

Mr. Chairman, in making these points, I do not dismiss lightly the argument made by some of the veto holding states that one of the merits of the veto is that it ensures all of them will be supportive of decisions of the Council.

In this regard I recall that the Permanent Representative of the United Kingdom made this point on Tuesday. But I did note that he made it in the context of a statement which emphasised at the outset that the veto was designed to ensure that the Organization did not, by vote, pit itself against a major Power by taking decisions under Chapter VII for military action or economic sanctions against such a Power. I might agree reluctantly with Ambassador Weston that it is still true that the United Nations is not in a position to take binding measure against one of the current permanent members.

But I do not believe that it is possible to generalize from that conclusion to decision making on other situations which might come before the Council. Firstly, I would recall, with respect to the many resolutions of the Council on Bosnia, the fact that all of the permanent members in support of a resolution did not guarantee an effective response by the United Nations. Sadly this was not the case. Unanimity of the P5 certainly does not guarantee that a permanent member will supply troops. And, as it has been demonstrated all too plainly, nor does it guarantee that they will meet the financial costs.

Quite the contrary. So there is something lacking in this argument to justify the veto.

Furthermore, I believe that to examine this issue more deeply one needs to consider also the obverse. Is it really the case that a negative vote by a permanent member on an issue which did not directly involve its national security would always, or even often, create an insuperable problem for the United Nations? The answer will probably be yes if the permanent member is itself the object of the resolution. But take the Security Council resolution 964 on Haiti in 1994. Colleagues will recall that two Council members abstained on that resolution, one a non permanent member, the other a permanent member. Let us suppose that the non permanent member had been a permanent member of the Council and there had been a change to Article 27(3) as New Zealand envisages, limiting the veto to matters directly affecting the permanent members' national security. What would have happened? I think the answer to the question is fairly predictable. A major point of principle and policy was involved and there might have been a negative vote. But it was not an issue which directly affected any country's national security. In all probability, UNMIH would have developed along much the same lines.

In my view therefore it goes altogether too far to claim that the negative vote of a permanent member in and of itself would be the kiss of death for the UN's credibility on this sort of issue.

But let us go one step further. It is also well known that while Resolution 964 was being drafted two real permanent members had serious reservations for different reasons and one abstained. No one blocked the resolution by veto, but again I think it stretches credibility to claim that the operation would have faced insurmountable problems if the resolution had been adopted despite a negative vote of a permanent member.

What then is the veto protecting when it goes beyond the direct security interests of the wielding state? As I see it, and as I have experienced it, it allows the veto holders to intervene in foreign policy and security issues for reasons which are not material to the merits of the particular case. Thus we see the veto, actual veto or closet veto, being used for extraneous political purposes, for budgetary reasons which under the Charter are exclusively the province of the General Assembly, and to respond to domestic political needs.

Mr. Chairman, what I think this analysis brings out is another, and perhaps the most important, feature of the way the world has changed. In my view, the real reason why the Council has been able to work much more consensually in recent times is not, as some have claimed, because the veto forces them to -- but because so many of the situations the Council is facing no longer engage the direct national interests of the veto holders. Surely we should take advantage of this fortuitous situation and face up to this last and most important new reality. There is no need for the veto most of the time.

So let's look seriously together at the various options for limiting its application to those few cases where -- at least for now -- it may still be relevant. Perhaps we will find that we can draw a distinction between negative votes on some issues which would not block adoption, and negative votes on other issues which might.

In this context, I need to emphasise that if the time has come to modernise the Council, then most certainly it is not the time to expand the number of veto holders. We need to set the historical trend in the opposite direction.

Expanding the number of veto holders will only further entrench it as an institution. It would set the clock back to the model that applied early in the 20th century of balance of power politics in which the small countries were only pawns. It would create a more sophisticated form of colonialism in the 21st Century -- colonising the seats in the Security Council.

The fate of the League of Nations should have taught everyone a lesson. That organization failed and the world was thrown into the chaos of global war. It was an organization with plenty of vetoes all round. They did not save it. It failed because there was no culture of respect by the powerful for the view of the democratically ascertained majority.

Mr. Chairman, if we create new vetoes, if we fail to begin to roll back the existing ones, we are perpetuating and reinforcing that climate of impunity, that culture of unilateralism.

We have the opportunity to begin, step by step, to build the opposite climate. A Security Council, which responded to the views of the majority on most of the issues before it, is likely to be a much healthier body not only for the majority but, in the long run, for the veto holders as well.

Mr. Chairman, at our meeting on 26 April I warmly commended the statement by the Permanent Representative of Japan for the position which Japan had taken on the veto. It is particularly important that one of the countries seeking to play a larger role in the Council recognises the problems which the veto creates both as regard the current situation and for the future.

We particularly welcomed the flexibility indicated by Japan and the statement that Japan does not seek the veto. That is a constructive position. But there is a need for equally constructive indications from others. In this regard we will study closely the interesting comment made by the representative of Germany this morning (click here for the most recent statement from Germany on these issues). But we have still to see any indications of flexibility from the current veto holders.

The maintenance of maximalist positions, as we have said early in the week, will only ensure the maximalist positions on the other side continue.

Finally, Mr. Chairman, I want to say a few words on the related subject of periodical review. One has to start from the facts.

There is already a provision in the Charter which permits review. So what would a new provision add?

At one level, we could of course in the absence of consensus on the whole question of reform of the Security Council, take a political decision that kept all proposals alive and review them again after a definite period. That would be one form of periodic review.

A second possibility might be that a provision for review would become an actual element in an overall compromise package. Clearly, if a review provision were to play such a role in a package, it would have to carry some substantive weight. It would have to constitute part of a trade off that helped one side to accept the package as a whole.

And of course, if it were to carry weight as a negotiating element, it would have to do something significantly different from the existing review provision. What then could "periodic review" add to the package that might make it more acceptable?

The only real weight that a review could have would be if it addressed the problem with Article 108. As we all know, the existing review process is subject to unilateral frustration by veto holders. The only meaningful element that a periodic review could contribute to an overall compromise package would be to adjust the way in which Article 108 operates. If a new provision for periodical review were able to address the last of the 3 Ps which I referred to on Monday -- the issue of perpetuity -- so that any new class of privileged members would not be able to unilaterally frustrate future reviews then it would add a meaningful element to an eventual compromise.