This article was written soon after the commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the United Nations (UN) Charter on 26 June 2025, as we wait to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the establishment of the Organisation on 24 October 2025. It is therefore timely and useful to reflect on two propositions: first, that the UN is perhaps facing its most challenging crisis since its founding in 1945 because of the undermining of both its Charter and functioning by some of the UN’s most powerful founding Member States and some other Member States supported by the former; second, that notwithstanding these challenges and its imperfections, the UN still remains the world’s greatest and most enduring hope for the provision of global peace and security, human rights and global public goods. It is also still the closest to the type of global governance mechanism the world desperately needs at a time of both accelerating globalisation and multiple intersecting crises that range from illegal military interventions, genocide and systemic human rights abuses, a potential global tariff war and impending global recession.
There is no doubt that the UN needs to be reformed—even transformed—but it also simultaneously needs to be strengthened and properly resourced if it is to address the formidable peace and security, human rights, global public goods and other transnational challenges of the 21st century. The 2024 UN Pact for the Future and its two related documents, the Global Digital Compact and the Declaration on Future Generations agreed at the UN Summit for the Future in New York by consensus in September last year, are testimony to the fact that the UN will remain at centre stage in terms of the world’s current and future global, regional and national governance architecture. The UN Charter’s principles and values are timeless and as relevant today as they were in 1945. While some important amendments to it are necessary to account for the considerable changes which have taken place from the time it was written and agreed 80 years ago, any attempt to start an entirely new process of creating a new Charter or building a new international Organisation to replace the current United Nations would be a mistake and result in mayhem.
That said, the unprecedented geopolitical and geoeconomic events, especially since Trump 2.0 began on 20 January 2025, and his administration’s undermining of global multilateralism of which the UN is both the anchor and bedrock, require yet another urgent reaffirmation of both the Charter and the Organisation in September 2025 when the 80th UN General Assembly (UNGA) convenes. This is necessary because as the current UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned the UNGA on 26 June this year, UN Charter Day, the foundational UN document and its principles, written as a ‘….declaration of hope’ are suffering ‘…assaults….like never before,’ with countries following ‘… an all too familiar pattern: follow when the Charter suits, and ignore when it does not’. Guterres added that the Charter ‘…is not optional, and it is not a la carte menu…. We cannot and must not normalize violations of its most basic principles’.1
This needs to be unequivocally accepted by all 193 UN Member States and publicly announced at the forthcoming September 2025 gathering of heads of state and senior officials in New York. It must also be agreed there that if the UN did not exist, it would have to be reinvented and a new Charter and Organisation, if created in the illiberal world we live in today, would be far worse than the inspiring UN Charter and Organisation which were agreed, created and unanimously endorsed eight decades ago.
MAIN ACHIEVEMENTS
Any objective assessment would conclude that the UN’s three main pillars—peace and security, human rights and development—have stood the test of time. These three pillars are integrally linked: you cannot have peace and security without development or development without peace and security, and neither will be possible without human rights. Many of the world’s current seemingly intractable problems exist because of a lack of appreciation by both policy makers and ordinary citizens about the importance and interconnectedness of these three pillars.
Any independent evaluation of the Organisation will also probably conclude that it has made an enormous, largely measurable, positive and constructive contribution to the world and its citizens over the last 80 years. The list of UN accomplishments is long and impressive and cannot be elaborated in this short article. Only a few ‘big picture’ ones can be enumerated here. At the top of the success list is overseeing decolonisation which is, indeed, one of this world body’s early historic achievements. Its other major achievements include, but are not limited to: significant contributions towards preventing a third world war so far; the adoption of universal human rights normative standards and institutions around much of the world; saving millions of lives during humanitarian crises; eradicating life-threatening diseases; significantly facilitating the fastest pace of genuine global, regional and national developmental progress in world history; and achieving an unprecedented global consensus by all its 193 Member States on the human rights based Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Agenda 2030, by far the most ambitious global development agenda ever agreed in world history.
In terms of its continuing contributions at a more practical level and on a day-to-day basis, the world and its people should not forget what the women and men of the United Nations do every day. In 2024, they were daily protecting and assisting 123.2 million refugees and other forcibly displaced people2 who had to flee their homes. As a result of groundbreaking research work on vaccines by both the World Health Organization (WHO) and its supported initiatives, as well as WHO and UNICEF supported global delivery on the ground, 89 per cent of all infants globally had at least one dose of the diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (DPT) vaccine by 2024 while 85 per cent had all three;3 the UN World Food Programme (WFP) provided food assistance to 153 million people in over 120 different countries in 2023;4 while 76,671 men and women in uniform were providing UN peacekeeping duties in May 2023.5 And these are just a few examples.
UNPRECEDENTED GLOBAL CHALLENGES
Despite the UNs innumerable, undeniable ‘big picture’ and more down-to-earth past and continuing achievements and successes, the 21st century we now live in is confronted with many challenges, both new and old.
A major concern for the peace and security pillar is the increase in the number and intensity of large-scale crises. Since 2008, the number of conflicts in the world has tripled. The list includes conflicts in the Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Liberia, Afghanistan, Mali, South Sudan, Libya, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Myanmar, Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon and the broader Middle East, and most recently Iran, Bangladesh and between India and Pakistan.
This list, which is not exhaustive, is long and unfortunately growing. Some of these conflicts are intra-state, not inter-state in nature, while others are transnational. Together, they indicate that the nature of conflict has changed considerably since World War II. Any Trump- announced ceasefire or peace ‘deals’ such as between Ukraine and Russia, Iran and Israel or the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda are either non-existent or extremely fragile, subject to breakdowns without notice. One direct result of conflict is displacement. In 2024, forcibly displaced people worldwide were estimated to be a staggering large and record breaking 123.2 million people,6 a significant increase from previous years, with one in 67 people globally being forcibly displaced. Of these, 73.5 million people were internally displaced while 42.7 million were refugees (Duggal, 2025).
Transnational violent extremism has also emerged as a universal preoccupation and concern over the last few decades. Terrorism is not new, but its geographical reach, financial resources and the ability to attract minds is unsurpassed today. In addition, climate related natural disasters are becoming more existential and frequent (with 45.8 million disaster related forced displacements as of 2024), and their destructive impacts are more intense. Every year, we continue to achieve the wrong set of records, whether on pollution, rising sea levels or greenhouse gas concentrations.
In terms of the development pillar, addressing climate change remains the world’s most urgent and existential crisis, but effectively combating growing transnational and national inequalities and the good governance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the public interest for the global public good are equally important.
An additional related major set of challenges are the multiple crises of governance fueling disruption and violence. Today’s violent conflicts are often rooted in poor governance, corruption, oppression, mismanagement of natural resources, exclusion and inequality. For example, systematic discrimination against minorities is widespread and tends to exacerbate the alienation on which terrorists feed. This has been sadly true in many parts of Africa but even in South Asia, especially in Pakistan and Sri Lanka for decades, but more recently in India and Bangladesh as well.
COVID-19 served to compound the world’s challenges and make matters even more dire. The world cannot even begin to hope that these multiple and often interlinked crises will be adequately addressed or overcome without a reaffirmed, albeit renewed, transformed and revitalised United Nations for the 21st century.
THE GLOBAL TRAGEDY OF TRUMP 2.0 AND ITS MULTIPLIER EFFECTS
The lead and most important founding Member State of the United Nations in 1945, the United States of America (US), has become its most significant threat from within under Trump 2.0. His second Presidency has the real potential to obliterate many of the tangible peace and security, human rights and development gains resulting from eight decades of global liberal idealism embodied in and led by the United Nations. Even George W. Bush’s unilateral invasion of Iraq under false pretenses, willfully violating both the international rule of law and the UN Charter, did not fundamentally question or irretrievably undermine the existing UN based global liberal world order as Trump’s actions are doing today.
The Biden administration, which succeeded Trump 1.0, had to swing the pendulum back from his predecessor’s unilateral policy actions against the UN on his very first day in office when the US rejoined both the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement and the WHO, from both of which Trump had initiated the process of withdrawing the US during his first presidential term. Trump 2.0, predictably, reversed Biden’s actions on his very first day in office on 20 January 2025 by unilaterally, once again, giving notice of the US’s withdrawal from both the Paris Climate Agreement and the WHO, even though only the US Congress has the legal authority to do so after the US pays all its outstanding dues to the organisation in question, which it has not done and appears to have no intention of doing.
Subsequently, President Trump also withdrew the US from the UN Human Rights Council (HRC), the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and the UN Framework Convention on Tax Cooperation currently being negotiated. The Trump 2.0 Administration, has also now, most recently in late July 2025, once again (as it did in 2018 during Trump 1.0) given notice of the US withdrawal from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), at a time Israel is committing genocide against Gazans with US support, citing as the reason the State of Palestine’s membership in it. This is still only the beginning, with significant implications for UN core and other resources and much else. Sadly, going by their record in 2025 to-date, neither the new US Congress, US Senate, US Supreme Court or the main opposition Democratic Party are likely to provide any effective checks and balances during Trump 2.0.
There will, no doubt, be many self-goals and chaotic selfinterested daily swings, but it is now impossible to swing the pendulum back to the status-quo ante. It is more useful to think of how this crisis can be converted into an opportunity for the transformative reforms the UN in any case needs if it is to more effectively address the challenges of the 21st century. The current financial delinquency of the US to the UN is being made worse, sadly and somewhat surprisingly, by the
cuts to their overseas aid commitments as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and aid budgets from 2025, and in some cases, to their UN commitments by another UN Security Council (UNSC) Permanent 5 (P5) member, the UK (shockingly under a Labour government), and some middle European powers (e.g., Sweden, Netherlands) who are amongst the biggest beneficiaries of a UN embedded global multilateral system. This comes at a time when they and the UN need each other like never before since the Organisation’s founding.
The UK and many European Union (EU) members, preoccupied with their own existential domestic immigration, defense, economic, trade, financial and foreign policy crises, partly created by Trump 2.0 but partly by their own policies, appear to be cutting aid to both the UN and the poorest countries. They see such cuts as a soft target, given NATO Members’ June 2025 agreement to increase their annual defence requirements and defence and security related expenditure to 5 per cent of GDP by 20357 and because, for political reasons, they cannot easily cut social welfare programmes at home to finance their defence needs.
EU members, such as Sweden, who have been amongst the UN’s staunchest and most consistent defenders since its founding 80 years, like the US now, under its current right-wing government, have permanently stopped their core contribution to the UNRWA in 2024, during the Israeli genocide of Gazans, at the worst possible time. This was unthinkable of Sweden till very recently.
The UK, Sweden and the Netherlands should urgently reverse course. Collectively, together with France, Germany, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Mexico, Japan, the Republic of Korea and key countries in the Global South (e.g., BRICS members, Turkiye, ASEAN members), they should be prioritising filling the fast-growing liquidity and financial gap left by the US in support of an appropriately adapted and reformed UN.
The current illiberal conjuncture and financial gap in core funding to the UN leaves a vacuum which an even more illiberal China can and may well fill across the UN and the multilateral system if the countries mentioned do not come together and deliver and prove that they are up to the challenge of protecting the liberal, democratic, global world order underpinned by the UN. China’s core contribution now amounts to almost the same as the US at around 20 per cent of the UN’s core budget. Unlike the US, however, it has, so far, been a more responsible UN Member State in many ways since it remains committed to paying its core ‘assessed’ contributions, even if its payments are often very late.
Trump 2.0 actions on the Ukraine crisis and its inability to get Russia to agree to abide by even a temporary ceasefire has also given an illiberal and already belligerent Russia confidence that the US will no longer be a threat to it either bilaterally or in multilateral fora. It may now feel emboldened to violate Ukraine and exercise its UNSC veto even more brazenly than it already has in the last few years. In late July 2025, President Putin was given a long 50-day notice by Trump to carry on his invasion of Ukraine, later shortened considerably out of his increased frustration with Russia to 8 August 2025. While the US President did not follow through on his threatened tariffs on Russia or secondary tariffs on China on 8 August, he did, on 6 August, impose an additional 25 per cent tariff on US imports from India (bringing India’s total to 50 per cent) to penalise the latter for its oil and defence equipment purchases from Russia, to come into effect on 27 August, unless they are changed or revoked before then. He has also agreed a 15 August bilateral summit on Ukraine with President Putin in Alaska to discuss a ceasefire but without President Zelensky’s presence. This is despite the fact that Russia has recently escalated its carnage in Ukraine. President Putin must have rejoiced at President Trump’s actions withdrawing US support for the UN International Criminal Court’s (ICC) War Crimes prosecution against him.
Trump 2.0 has also given Israel under Netanyahu carte blanche to extend its genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, including by publicly and unashamedly using starvation and ethnic cleansing as weapons of war against the more than two million Gazans who are already largely displaced and besieged. The recent attacks by Israel and the United States on Iran and by Israel in Syria, including Damascus, in clear violation of both the UN Charter and the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT), have served to further sideline and undermine both the UNSC itself and the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as well as its monitoring role and NPT protocols.
TURNING CRISES INTO TRANSFORMATIVE OPPORTUNITY
The world once again faces multiple global peace and security, human rights and sustainable development crises as it did during the Second World War out of the ashes of which the UN was created. As the existential consequences of climate change become ever clearer, the UN pillar of sustainable development is increasingly threatened, particularly because progress on the UN 2030 SDGs Agenda 2030 remains way off track.8 Achieving this human rights-based Agenda is vital to maintaining both peace and security and promoting and protecting human rights. The most important reform initiatives needed for a transformed, ‘fit-for-purpose’ UN for the 21st century are outlined below.
1. Fully implement the UN Secretary General’s agreed UN Development System (UNDS) Reform Agenda, implemented since January 2019
Expand this agenda in an integrated and coherent manner to encompass all levels: global, regional and country. A One UN approach was the essence of this agenda but has only been partially implemented at country level thus far over the last six years.9
At the global level, this will require merging overlapping institutional mandates, agencies, boards, policies, committees, and reducing and merging staff. The work of the UN80 Initiative unveiled in March 2025 by the UN Secretary General as a systemwide effort to increase efficiencies, review overlapping mandates and make structural changes to reaffirm the UN’s relevance and sharpen its impact is a step in the right direction, even though it should have come much earlier. But it needs to be bolder, more strategic, more consultative with staff, Member States and civil society and other partners, and prioritise cultural change among UN staff and institutions in favour of a cross-cutting One UN institutional and staff culture. It should not become entangled in bureaucracy and compromises. It should also be much more strategic in how and which staff and budgets are cut. The current instruction mandating a blanket 15–20 per cent cut in core resources and a similar 20 per cent cut in posts for the 2026 budget across the entire UN Secretariat, with a few exceptions, freezing all unfilled positions regardless of how strategic they may be to fill, appears to be a non-strategic and bureaucratic approach.
As part of this initiative, there is a strong prima facie case to look at global level mandate and institutional mergers between several of the more than 40 UN agencies.10 UNDP, as the UN’s primary development agency, needs to both reposition and reconfigure itself to primarily focus on both the policy aspects of global and national public goods as well as on their provision on-the-ground, e.g., climate change, renewable energy security, growth with equity, inequalities, good governance, including that of AI.
Also at the global level, the UN Resident Coordinator (RC) system needs to be made more core and central to the entire One UN Reform as was intended in 2019 but only partially implemented. Only around 30 per cent of the UN Development Coordination Office’s budget of US$182 million currently comes from core assessed UN Member State contributions. This needs to reach at least 50 per cent by 2030.
The two Bretton Woods institutions, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which are specialised agencies of the United Nations, no different from the WHO or the International Labour Organization (ILO), have had a life of their own with little or no real accountability to the UN. Such
accountability to a strengthened UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) needs to be prioritised. This body should not just address economic, environmental and social issues but jointly, with the UNSC, also address key peace and security issues such as the climate change challenge, which cut across the mandates of both ECOSOC and the UNSC.
At the regional level, there must be an urgent, thorough, objective review of the work of all the UN Regional Economic Commissions to enhance and sharpen their value added on the provision of regional public goods and make it more strategic. Priority should also be placed on how they can be an integral part of the One UN at the regional and country levels and contribute to it. The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) was a trailblazer in many substantive respects for many decades and some of its achievements and the lessons from its experiences will be particularly useful inputs for the reform and transformation of ECLAC in Santiago, Chile, but also for the four other UN Regional Economic Commissions based in Geneva, Addis Ababa, Beirut and Bangkok.
Country level action is most important for the achievement of the SDGs. At the country level, Vietnam, perhaps, has provided a best practice example of the One UN in practice over the last two decades with demonstrable results in achieving all the 2015 Millennium Development Goals (MDG) early (UNDP, 2015), as well as progress on the SDGs (UNICEF, 2022).
The ‘Delivering as One’ (UNDOCO, 2014) pilot phase, one of the most exemplary precursors to the 2019 global UNDS Reform, led to the creation of a UN Communications Team in Vietnam 18 years ago in 2007. This team has been essential in conveying a consistent ‘One UN’ message in the country since then. From the time of the move of most UN agencies resident in Vietnam to the Green One UN House in Hanoi in 2015, there has also been a One Common Back Office (CBO) Team servicing them.
An even bigger step taken by the UN in Vietnam in August 2017, well before the latest January 2019 reforms began to be implemented, was to get almost all UN Agency Program staff present in Vietnam to physically sit and work together, not by Agency, but by what strategic areas they substantively worked on in terms of the priorities of the jointly agreed Government of Vietnam One UN Strategic Plan 2017–2021. In practice, this meant that everyone in UN House was grouped and sat in Program Clusters under the Plan’s four substantive strategic areas: Inclusive Social Development, Inclusive Growth, Climate Change, and Governance and Access to Justice. Thematic Clusters such as on Gender, Human Rights and Disaster Response were also created. Staff working in functional areas such as Communications and Finance had already been part of Operational Clusters since 2015.
This was truly revolutionary for the UN both in Vietnam and globally. It was also essential for breaking down institutional and cultural barriers between different UN agencies and their staff and a step towards working creatively and synergistically together as a One UN to help Vietnam achieve Agenda 2030. While there has been some rollback on this arrangement since 2022, that should be reconsidered.
A key lesson from Vietnam’s experience is the importance of the government leading the One UN on the ground. Without this leadership, progress on achieving the SDGs will be slower than it would otherwise have been. This remains a challenge in many developing countries.
Another set of challenges surround the fact that, even though the UN RC, since 2019, is officially acknowledged by all parties as the full-time Representative of the UN Secretary- General at the country level, and while all 193 UN Member States have endorsed the SDGs which are human rights-based, most of these same Member States do not accept the RC’s role in human rights and peace and security issues.
A One UN cannot be effective, and Agenda 2030 cannot be achieved at the country level, unless it is comprehensive and includes the implementation of programmes under all three indivisible UN pillars under the leadership and responsibility of the RC and UN Country Team (UNCT).
2. Redefining the Development Pillar to Prioritise Global Public Goods
The UN should declare justified success in terms of its support for traditional development areas such as poverty reduction, basic health and education over the last 80 years since the vast majority of its decolonised Member States, with Vietnam again being a prime example, are now able to finish the last mile work in these areas using their national budgets and without UN financial support (a few LDCs and LLDCs may require some continuing support in these areas but they are a small minority). Instead, the UN’s development pillar should prioritise global public goods such as climate change, energy security and AI governance, as well as inequality reduction and good governance. The US$1 billion Multi-Partner Trust Fund (MPTF) should prioritise global public goods rather than the funding of traditional development projects, UN support for which should be significantly reduced.
3. Reinvigorating and Integrating the Peace and Security Architecture
Three illegal invasions in recent years show that the UN’s peace and security and nuclear non-proliferation architecture has stopped functioning as it should: it was and continues to be both undermined and bypassed in Ukraine by Russia, and in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran and now even Syria by Israel with US support. The
UN Charter and the international rule of law have been abused not only by P5 members such as the US (Iraq, Afghanistan and now Iran) and Russia (Crimea in 2014 and all of Ukraine since 2022), but by smaller countries (Israel) armed and effectively backed by bigger powers (USA, Germany, UK), with some major
developing countries remaining deafeningly silent (India).
Making the UN effective in maintaining peace and security again, the main reason for its creation after World War II, will require both the integration of and greater coherence between the DPPA, DPO, OCT, ODA, UNODC11 and the UN Peacebuilding Commission (PBC). The PBC should also be strengthened to
enable it to take up some of the UNSC’s agenda, leaving the latter to concentrate on the most important ‘big picture’ transnational peace and security issues.
In addition, addressing the following long-standing challenges and agreeing and carrying out enforceable reforms to address them should be an urgent, top priority.
Broadening UNSC Permanent Member Composition
The UN has lost some of its political legitimacy over the last three decades, relative to what it enjoyed in its first five decades. This is a result of structural design flaws that have existed from its inception in 1945 which became increasingly visible and problematic after the simultaneous fall of the Berlin Wall and Soviet Union and the rise of some of the larger emerging economies in the Global South in the original BRICS grouping, namely India, Brazil and South Africa.
It is now universally agreed that the P5 members of the UNSC—USA, China, Russian Federation, United Kingdom (UK), France—do not and cannot represent the changed geopolitical, geoeconomic, demographic or even realpolitik realities in a dramatically changed 21st century world. The P5, visibly and untenably, excludes the traditional Global South which now comprises a significant percentage of the world’s population and economic wealth. It also excludes Germany and Japan. In the P5 Security Council context, the UK, France and even Russia are now both anachronisms and anomalies, given their significantly reduced 21st century geoeconomic and geopolitical weight. They should have been obliged to exit permanent membership long ago, ideally in 1991, when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) dissolved. This was a golden missed opportunity both to reform and transform the UN Security Council. Such an opportunity is unlikely to present itself in the foreseeable future.
The dire need for a more democratically constituted and 21st century relevant UN Security Council, nevertheless, remains urgent and essential. Most UN Member States support a comprehensive reform of the Council, which means an expansion in both the permanent and non-permanent categories, not a piecemeal reform.
While India, Brazil and even South Africa’s demands for such inclusion are legitimate in terms of Global South representation, the bar for Permanent Membership of the UNSC should be higher than it was in 1945 at the UN’s founding if we want a better future world than the one we inhabit today. Each one of the new aspirants needs to demonstrate more consistently and clearly than the current P5 that they can put global and regional interests before their narrowly defined national interest.
UNSC Paralysis and Crisis
The paralysis and crisis in the UNSC has been repeatedly and continuously visible from the turn of the century. This was evident in both its inappropriate and inadequate responses, or lack thereof, to the Iraq, Syrian and Libyan interventions by major powers starting more than two decades ago, as well as by its inability to do anything of significance to stop the current illegal interventions in Ukraine, Gaza and Iran. It has also done little on the world’s existential climate and other major social and economic security challenges.
The P3 (the US, China and Russia), within the P5 of the Council, have also repeatedly undermined both its credibility and effectiveness and that of the UN through attempts to entirely bypass the Council (e.g., the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the recent 2025 unilateral attack by Israel and the US on Iran), or
through the exercise of their veto power in an inappropriate and narrowly self-interested manner (e.g., repeated unconscionable US vetoes in favour of Israel, Russian and Chinese vetoes on Syria to protect the Assad regime, as well as the Russian blockage of UNSC discussions and resolutions on its illegal invasion of
Ukraine since 2022).
The P5 must recognise, in their own self-interest, even if not because this is clearly in the global interest, that they risk throwing the ‘baby out with the bath water’ if they do not broaden permanent Security Council membership and restrict the use of the P5 veto.
Exercise of the P5 Veto Power in the UN Security Council The veto power served a useful stabilising purpose during the Cold War, successfully helping to prevent a Third World War. But it has been criticised for at least 34 years now, since the USSR was dissolved. As of 4 June 2025, the US had used a total of 88 vetoes, 50 of which (a staggering 57 per cent) were against resolutions condemning Israel, including the most recent UNSC veto in June 2025 when the US blocked a UNSC resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire and resumption of UN and other humanitarian aid to prevent famine and starvation in Gaza.12
According to the same source, Russia/USSR has now used the veto an astonishing 129 times, increasingly after the dissolution of the USSR. The undisguised purpose was to protect their allies, such as but not limited to Syria, North Korea and Yemen, and more recently to protect itself from sanctions after its illegal invasion of Ukraine.
The People’s Republic of China has used its veto 19 times, including to deny Bangladesh’s admission to the UN in 1972 soon after it had formally displaced Taiwan, Republic of China to join the UN as well as the UNSC only a year earlier in October 1971. It also joined Russia in vetoing resolutions on Syria numerous
times after 2011.
While there is a strong case to abolish the UN Security Council P5 veto power because of this glaringly narrow partisan record, as well as to prevent further abuse and misuse, this is unrealistic and unlikely in the short term because the current P5 will not give up the veto easily or quickly. The P5 veto power, agreed in 1945 as a prerequisite to UN Charter adoption, was built into the system as an insurance that the system itself would work and that the major powers would not act outside it. Despite the glaring exceptions mentioned above and the overwhelming use of the veto to protect one country, Israel, in particular, the reason for its original purpose largely remains true, in overall
terms, even today.
Nevertheless, a strong case can certainly be made for restraint on the use of the veto (e.g., its use only for matters which are central for the absolute national security of a UN Member State). This may also be both more realistic and desirable. There have already been a few noteworthy initiatives in the UNGA to
restrict the use of the veto and strengthen the accountability of the Security Council to the UNGA. This was already foreseen and envisaged when the UN Charter was drawn up in 1945, so it does not require any change to the UN Charter.
The most noteworthy of these is Liechtenstein’s 2020 ‘Veto Initiative’,13 spurred by deadlock at the UNSC on the Syrian war. While the resolution was delayed because of COVID-19, it was adopted in the UNGA by consensus on 26 April 2022. This was quite a remarkable achievement, led by one of the UN’s smallest Member States. It was also unprecedented since it ‘creates a standing mandate for the Assembly (UNGA) to be convened automatically, within ten working days, every time a veto has been cast in the Security Council’.14
This initiative needs to be urgently reinforced, mainstreamed and built upon. It is significant that three P5 members, the UK, France and the United States (during the Biden administration), supported the Liechtenstein initiative while France, together with Mexico, had initiated a declaration seeking restrictions on the use of the UNSC veto as far back as 2015.
Together with the ‘Uniting for Peace’ mechanism, which allows the UNGA to step into and fill serious security gaps left by the Security Council, this should lead to greater accountability of the Council to the UNGA which is a more democratic body with universal membership, one-country, one-vote and no veto power. The 1950 Uniting for Peace resolution has also been increasingly invoked recently, both in the case of Ukraine and Gaza, including in a UNGA resolution and vote leading to Russia’s expulsion from the UN Human Rights Council.
Much more can be done in the General Assembly, nevertheless, but unfortunately, there is a limitation. Any radical reform of its role, for example, giving it the power to pass binding resolutions on matters relating to peace and security—would necessarily require an amendment of the UN Charter. Such an amendment requires the buy-in of the entire current P5 in the Security Council, which will not happen easily.
The proposal by India and many other countries in the Global South to convene a UN Charter Review Conference as a first step towards fundamental UNSC Reform should continue to be pursued. The 80th anniversary of the founding of the Organisation is the perfect opportunity to launch such a Charter Review Conference.
Enforcing Human Rights Conventions and Resolutions and Making their Coverage more Comprehensive
The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was as pathbreaking and inspiring as the UN Charter. The main challenge remains enforcement of UN Conventions and Resolutions in this area. Greater comprehensiveness and coherence of what the human rights architecture covers is also needed, especially in the context of the SDGs and the current multiple peace and security and human rights crises.
The Continuing and Accelerating Resources Crunch
The UN is arguably the world’s most underfunded multilateral organisation, given its formidable breadth and depth of global governance and other mandates. The Organisation continues to be forced to attempt to address them despite the visible absence of adequately demonstrated political will or even open obstruction by many of its most powerful Member States. This political will deficit has translated into inadequate core ‘assessed contributions’ which are now strikingly incommensurate to the UN’s long and growing list of mandates and responsibilities. This had become a cumulative and growing problem for the UN even before the arrival of Trump 2.0, with negative consequences for the fulfilment of even some of its core mandates such as the 2019 UN Development System Reform and Peacekeeping. As a result of cuts (UK), late payments oftentimes of even what was agreed (China) or, under Trump 2.0, an unprecedented unwillingness by the US to pay its arrears and 2025 assessed contribution, this has now created an existential liquidity crisis for the UN Secretariat.
To understand both the magnitude and nature of the UN’s current liquidity and financial crisis, it should be noted that of the total annual budget for the entire UN family of US$74.3 billion in 2022, 67 per cent were ear-marked funds.15 This reflects a retreat from the true spirit of multilateralism. The Organisation needs to get core resources which can be used for what the UN’s Sustainable Development Cooperation Frameworks prioritise, not what donors earmark their funds for.
The already prevailing liquidity and resources crunch at many UN agencies has escalated during Trump 2.0, forcing the WHO, for example, to freeze all hiring across the world to the detriment and even death, in some instances, of members of poor, already disempowered and marginalised population groups in Asia, Africa and Latin America. UNAIDS is in crisis given that it has relied on the US for around 40 per cent of its resources which were entirely cut, with little notice, since Trump 2.0 began.
While the UN’s transformative reforms outlined in this paper remain essential and there are longstanding, bureaucratic inefficiencies and wastage which also need to be addressed through internal organisational reforms, a number of which are currently ongoing, neither of these should become an excuse for UN Member States to delay addressing the ‘bigger picture’ liquidity and resources crunch which the UN currently faces, and which is preventing the fulfilment of many of its mandates which no other Organisation can ever hope to replace or fulfil.
* This article was current as of 12 August 2025.
NOTES
1. ‘Commemorating Anniversary of Charter, Secretary-General Stresses “We Cannot and Must Not Normalize Violations of its Most Basic Principles’”, https://press.un.org/en/2025/sgsm22704.doc.htm (accessed 20 July 2025).
2. UNHCR, www.unhcr.org/global-trends (accessed 20 July 2025).
3. ‘Global Childhood Vaccination Coverage Holds Steady, Yet Over 14 Million Infants Remain Unvaccinated – WHO, UNICEF’, https://www.who.int/news/item/15-07-2025-global-childhood-vaccination-coverage-holdssteady-yet-over-14-million-infants-remain-unvaccinated-who-unicef
(accessed 20 July 2025).
4. World Food Programme, https://www.wfp.org/ (accessed 20 July 2025).
5. United Nations, UN Peacekeeping Operations Factsheet, https://peacekeeping.un.org/sites/default/files/peacekeeping_fact_sheet_may_2025_english.pdf
(accessed 20 July 2025).
6. UNHCR, Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2024, https://www.unhcr.org/sites/default/files/2025-06/global-trends-report-2024.pdf (accessed 20 July 2025).
7. NATO, ‘Defence expenditures and NATO’s 5% commitment’, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_49198.htm (accessed 20 July 2025).
8. United Nations, 2024. The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2024, https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2024/ (accessed 20 July 2025).
9. United Nations, ‘Development Reform’, https://reform.un.org/content/development-reform (accessed 20 July 2025).
10. Mandate and organisational mergers could include but are not restricted to the WHO, the UN Joint Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the health programmes of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF); the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the International Trade Centre (ITC) and parts of the UN Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO); the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) Secretariat; the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), specific parts of the UN World Food Programme (WFP); the UN Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), the UN Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), UN University; humanitarian agencies working in conflict contexts (e.g., the emergency programmes of WHO, WFP and UNICEF); and the refugee and migration agencies (UN High Commissioner for Refugees [UNHCR] and the International Organization for Migration (IOM), possibly together with the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
11. Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA), Department of Peace Operations (DPO), Office of Counter-Terrorism (OCT), Office for Disarmament Affairs (ODC), United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
12. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council_veto_power (accessed 20 July 2025).
13. ‘Liechtenstein’s ‘Veto Initiative’ Wins Wide Approval at the UN. Will It Deter the Major Powers?’, https://una.org.uk/news/liechtensteins-vetoinitiative-wins-wide-approval-un-will-it-deter-major-powers (accessed 20 July 2025).
14. Ibid.
15. Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation. ‘Total Revenue of the UN System’, https://financingun.report/un-financing/un-funding/total-revenue-un-system (accessed 20 July 2025).
REFERENCES
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UNDOCO (UN Development Operations Coordination Office). 2014. Delivering as One on the MDGs and the Post 2015 Agenda. https://unsdg.un.org/sites/default/files/Delivering-as-One-on-the-MDGs-and-the-Post-2015-agenda.pdf (accessed 20 July 2025).
UNDP. 2015. ‘Country Report: 15 years Achieving the Viet Nam Millennium Development Goals’, 21 September. https://www.undp.org/vietnam/publications/country-report-15-years-achieving-viet-nam-milleniumdevelopment-goals (accessed 20 July 2025).
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India International Center Quarterly Journal (Delhi, India), Autumn 2025 issue, published and launched October 2025.