RESPOSIBILITY NOT TO VETO:

The international community has a responsibility to protect those threatened by genocide, war
crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. And the five permanent members of the UN
Security Council (P5) have a responsibility not to veto when the world needs them to respond and
to act. In 1945 veto power was conferred upon the five Permanent Members of the Security
Council.
But it is an unfortunate reality that in the decades since 1945 the veto has sometimes been used,
not to defend against the scourge of war or to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, to
quote the UN Charter, but to shield perpetrators of mass atrocities from accountability.
In one of the most tragic examples from our times, on four occasions since 2011 the veto has been
exercised by Russia and China to protect the government and armed groups in Syria from
resolutions designed to confront crimes against humanity and war crimes. At a time when urgent
measures should have been taken to protect civilians in Syria from mass atrocities, the Security
Council was instead paralyzed regarding a conflict that has now consumed more than 220,000
lives.
This is a powerful example from history.
Nevertheless, since 2005 the veto has been employed six times to block resolutions dealing with
possible mass atrocity crimes. And let us not forget the additional abuse of the silent veto -
meaning the threat of a veto during the negotiation phase behind closed doors at the Security
Council. This has been repeatedly used to quietly kill any resolution not to the liking of the P5. This
also needs to be kept in mind when we talk about veto restraint and reform.
The central point is that when the abuse of the veto means that the Security Council is unable to
protect threatened populations from mass atrocity crimes, then the veto has become a historical
anachronism that the UN can no longer afford.
That is why the delegate of fiji believe that a statement of principles on Security Council veto
restraint in mass atrocity situations is a practical and proximate way to reaffirm the underlying
principles of the UN Charter. Lets help prove the cynics wrong.

the use of the veto, or its threat, in a manner incompatible with the purposes of the United Nations.
is can make the Security Council irrelevant at times when it is most urgently needed... All ve
Permanent Members should be able to give the world one public commitment: that they will not
use their veto to block action aimed at ending or preventing atrocity crimes. is would be crucial to
enhance the Councils e ectiveness and its credibility.

the real problem is a more fundamental fracture between the permanent members of the Council.
Russian and Chinese hostility to action aimed at constraining the Assad government and other
perpetrators of atrocities in Syria is linked to a strategic clash between the P2 (Russia and China)
and the P3 (United States, United Kingdom and France) on a range of situations and thematic
issues from Sudan to the future of UN peacekeeping.102 Syria and R2P are symptoms, rather
than causes, of this malady.

Worryingly, from the Russian and Chinese perspective, a er the third Security Council veto in July
2012 a growing number of UN member states started to not only question Russias impartiality with
regard to Syria, but also the legitimacy and e cacy of the Security Council itself. In particular, the
veto rights of the ve permanent members came under increased scrutiny.

solution:
develop a code of conduct whereby the permanent members of the Security Council collectively
agree to refrain from using their veto with respect to mass [atrocity] crimes, which the responsibility
to protect is supposed to prevent.