UN General Assembly
2020

Mr. President If the ICC is of crucial importance to enforce respect for international law, that same can be said of the Security Council. Sadly, the Council is failing in this task on a regular basis. Time and again, it proves unable to enforce respect for international humanitarian law, to prevent mass atrocities and to see to it that the law governing the use of force is observed. The Council continues to apply an outdated notion of security which hampers the relevance of its work — and it is paralysed in near permanent political standoffs. In this scenario, the veto power of the five Permanent Members has a pervasive pernicious effect. For multilateralism to be operational, we need to be able to take action also where the Council finds itself in a deadlock — in this Assembly. Where the action of the General Assembly has been limited in the past, it was by choice, not by law. As a function of the Security Council’s failures to deliver, often due to the veto power, the responsibility of the General Assembly to step up and address these matters increases. We therefore believe that the General Assembly should meet and discuss every instance of a veto cast in the Security Council.