25 Facts About United Nations Security Council

United Nations Security Council is one of the six principal organs of the United Nations and is charged with ensuring international peace and security, recommending the admission of new UN members to the General Assembly, and approving any changes to the UN Charter.

Resolutions of the Security Council are typically enforced by UN peacekeepers, which consist of military forces voluntarily provided by member states and funded independently of the main UN budget.

Security Council was largely paralyzed in its early decades by the Cold War between the US and USSR and their allies and the Council generally was only able to intervene in unrelated conflicts.

However, the Security Council found itself bypassed in favour of direct negotiations between the superpowers in some of the decade's larger conflicts, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Vietnam War.

In 1991, the Security Council demonstrated its renewed vigor by condemning the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on the same day of the attack and later authorizing a US-led coalition that successfully repulsed the Iraqis.

Related searches

All members of the Security Council are signatory to the NPT, and all permanent members are nuclear weapons states.

Decisions taken under Chapter VII, such as economic sanctions, are binding on UN members; the Security Council is the only UN body with authority to issue binding resolutions.

Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court recognizes that the Security Council has authority to refer cases to the Court in which the Court could not otherwise exercise jurisdiction.

The United Nations Security Council exercised this power for the first time in March 2005, when it referred to the Court "the situation prevailing in Darfur since 1 July 2002"; since Sudan is not a party to the Rome Statute, the Court could not otherwise have exercised jurisdiction.

The Security Council made its second such referral in February 2011 when it asked the ICC to investigate the Libyan government's violent response to the Libyan Civil War.

Five permanent members of the Security Council were the victorious powers in World War II and have maintained the world's most powerful military forces ever since.

Between 1996 and 2012, the United Nations Security Council States vetoed 13 resolutions, Russia 7, and China 5, while France and the United Nations Security Council Kingdom did not use the veto.

The first veto by the United Nations Security Council States came in 1970, blocking General Assembly action in Southern Rhodesia.

Role of president of the Security Council involves setting the agenda, presiding at its meetings and overseeing any crisis.

Security Council has held meetings in cities including Nairobi, Kenya; Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; Panama City, Panama; and Geneva, Switzerland.

In March 2010, the Security Council moved into a temporary facility in the General Assembly Building as its chamber underwent renovations as part of the UN Capital Master Plan.

In 1994, the French ambassador complained to the Secretary-General that "informal consultations have become the United Nations Security Council's characteristic working method, while public meetings, originally the norm, are increasingly rare and increasingly devoid of content: everyone knows that when the United Nations Security Council goes into public meeting everything has been decided in advance".

Only members of the Security Council are permitted in the conference room for consultations.

The open meeting of the Security Council is merely a public ratification of a decision that has already been reached in private.

In 2012, the Security Council held 160 consultations, 16 private meetings and 9 public meetings.

In 2016, the Security Council held 150 consultations, 19 private meetings and 68 public meetings.

Scholar Sudhir Chella Rajan argued in 2006 that the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, who are all nuclear powers, have created an exclusive nuclear club that predominantly addresses the strategic interests and political motives of the permanent members—for example, protecting the oil-rich Kuwaitis in 1991 but poorly protecting resource-poor Rwandans in 1994.

Security Council has been criticized for failure in resolving many conflicts, including Cyprus, Sri Lanka, Syria, Kosovo, and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, reflecting the wider short-comings of the UN.

Proposals to reform the Security Council began with the conference that wrote the UN Charter and have continued to the present day.

The United Nations Security Council States has unequivocally supported the permanent membership of Japan and lent its support to India and a small number of additional non-permanent members.

Related searches