United Nations Security Council
The United Nations Security Council is one of the six principal organs of the United Nations system and is the primary organ charged with ensuring international peace and security. Its powers as outlined in the United Nations Charter include authorizing military action, establishing peacekeeping operations, recommending the admission of new members to the United Nations General Assembly, approving any changes to the Charter, and enacting international sanctions. Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter gives the Security Council the power to identify threats to international peace and security and to authorize responses, including the use of force. Security Council resolutions adopted under Chapter VII are binding on United Nations members and are therefore a source of international law. The Security Council is the only United Nations body with the authority to issue resolutions that are binding on its member states.
Like the United Nations as a whole, the United Nations Security Council was created after World War II in 1945 in the hope of preventing future wars and maintaining world peace, as the League of Nations had been formed following World War I. It held its first session on 17 January 1946 but was largely paralyzed in the following decades by the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, it authorized military interventions in the Korean War, the Congo Crisis, and peacekeeping missions in Cyprus, West New Guinea, and the Sinai Peninsula. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, United Nations peacekeeping efforts increased dramatically in scale, with the Security Council authorizing major military and peacekeeping missions in Kuwait, Namibia, Cambodia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The Security Council consists of 15 members, of which five are permanent: China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These were the great powers that were the victors of World War II. Permanent members can veto any substantive Security Council resolution, including those on the admission of new member states to the United Nations or nominees for the Office of the Secretary-General. This veto right does not carry over into General Assembly matters or votes, which are non-binding. The other 10 members are elected on a regional basis for a term of two years. The body's presidency rotates monthly amongst its members.
Resolutions of the Security Council are typically enforced by United Nations peacekeepers, which consist of military forces voluntarily provided by member states and funded independently of the main United Nations budget., there have been 12 peacekeeping missions with over 87,000 personnel from 121 countries, with a total annual budget of approximately $6.3 billion.
History
Background and creation
In the century prior to the UN's creation, several international treaty organizations and conferences had been formed to regulate conflicts between nations, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. Following the catastrophic loss of life in World War I, the Paris Peace Conference established the League of Nations to maintain harmony between the nations. This organization successfully resolved some territorial disputes and created international structures for areas such as postal mail, aviation, and opium control, some of which would later be absorbed into the UN. However, the League lacked representation for colonial peoples and significant participation from several major powers, including the US, the USSR, Germany, and Japan; it failed to act against the 1931 Japanese invasion of Manchuria, the Second Italo-Ethiopian War in 1935, the 1937 Japanese occupation of China, and Nazi expansions under Adolf Hitler that escalated into World War II.File:Cairo conference.jpg|thumb|Chiang Kai-shek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met at the Cairo Conference in 1943 during World War II.
File:Yalta Conference .jpg|thumb|British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Soviet general secretary Joseph Stalin at the Yalta Conference, February 1945
On New Year's Day 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Maxim Litvinov of the USSR, and T. V. Soong of the Republic of China, signed a short document, based on the Atlantic Charter and the London Declaration, which later came to be known as the United Nations Declaration. The next day, the representatives of 22 other nations added their signatures. The term "United Nations" was first officially used when 26 governments had signed the Declaration. By 1 March 1945, 21 additional states had signed. The term "Four Powers" was coined to refer to the four major Allied countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and the Republic of China. and became the foundation of an executive branch of the United Nations, the Security Council.
Following the 1943 Moscow Conference and Tehran Conference, in mid-1944, the delegations from the Allied "Big Four", the Soviet Union, the UK, the US and the Republic of China, met for the Dumbarton Oaks Conference in Washington, D.C. to negotiate the UN's structure, and the composition of the UN Security Council quickly became the dominant issue. France, the Republic of China, the Soviet Union, the UK and US were selected as permanent members of the Security Council; the US attempted to add Brazil as a sixth member but was opposed by the heads of the Soviet and British delegations. The most contentious issue at Dumbarton and in successive talks proved to be the veto rights of permanent members. The Soviet delegation argued that each nation should have an absolute veto that could block matters from even being discussed, whilst the British argued that nations should not be able to veto resolutions on disputes to which they were a party. At the Yalta Conference of February 1945, the American, British and Russian delegations agreed that each of the "Big Five" could veto any action by the council, but not procedural resolutions, meaning that the permanent members could not prevent debate on a resolution.
On 25 April 1945, the UN Conference on International Organization began in San Francisco, attended by fifty governments and a number of non-governmental organizations involved in drafting the United Nations Charter. At the conference, H. V. Evatt of the Australian delegation pushed to further restrict the veto power of Security Council permanent members. Due to the fear that rejecting the strong veto would cause the conference's failure, his proposal was defeated twenty votes to ten.
The UN officially came into existence on 24 October 1945 upon ratification of the Charter by the five then-permanent members of the Security Council and by a majority of the other 46 signatories. On 17 January 1946, the Security Council met for the first time at Church House, Westminster, in London, United Kingdom. Subsequently, during the 1946–1951 period, it conducted sessions at the United Nation's interim headquarters in Lake Success, New York, which were televised live on CBS by the journalist Edmund Chester in 1949.
Cold War
The Security Council was largely paralysed 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. In 1956, the first UN peacekeeping force was established to end the Suez Crisis; however, the UN was unable to intervene against the USSR's simultaneous invasion of Hungary following the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Cold War divisions also paralysed the Security Council's Military Staff Committee, which had been formed by Articles 45–47 of the UN Charter to oversee UN forces and create UN military bases. The committee continued to exist on paper but largely abandoned its work in the mid-1950s.In 1960, the UN deployed the United Nations Operation in the Congo, the largest military force of its early decades, to restore order to the breakaway State of Katanga, restoring it to the control of the Democratic Republic of the Congo by 1964. 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. Focusing instead on smaller conflicts without an immediate Cold War connection, the Security Council deployed the United Nations Temporary Executive Authority in West New Guinea in 1962 and the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus in 1964, the latter of which would become one of the UN's longest-running peacekeeping missions.
On 25 October 1971, over US opposition, but with the support of many Third World nations, along with the Socialist People's Republic of Albania, the mainland, communist People's Republic of China replaced the Republic of China with a seat on the Security Council; the vote was widely seen as a sign of waning US influence in the organization. With an increasing Third World presence and the failure of UN mediation in conflicts in the Middle East, Vietnam and Kashmir, the UN increasingly shifted its attention to its ostensibly secondary goals of economic development and cultural exchange. By the 1970s, the UN budget for social and economic development was far greater than its budget for peacekeeping.
Post-Cold War
After the Cold War, the UN saw a radical expansion in its peacekeeping duties, taking on more missions in ten years than it had in the previous four decades. Between 1988 and 2000, the number of adopted Security Council resolutions more than doubled, and the peacekeeping budget increased more than tenfold. The UN negotiated an end to the Salvadoran Civil War, launched a successful peacekeeping mission in Namibia, and oversaw democratic elections in post-apartheid South Africa and post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia. 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. Undersecretary-General Brian Urquhart later described the hopes raised by these successes as a "false renaissance" for the organization, given the more troubled missions that followed.Though the UN Charter had been written primarily to prevent aggression by one nation against another, in the early 1990s, the UN faced a number of simultaneous, serious crises within nations such as Haiti, Mozambique and the former Yugoslavia. The UN mission to Bosnia faced "worldwide ridicule" for its indecisive and confused mission in the face of ethnic cleansing. In 1994, the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda failed to intervene in the Rwandan genocide in the face of Security Council indecision.
In the late 1990s, UN-authorized international interventions took a wider variety of forms. The UN mission in the 1991–2002 Sierra Leone Civil War was supplemented by British Royal Marines and the UN-authorized 2001 invasion of Afghanistan was overseen by NATO. In 2003, the US invaded Iraq despite failing to pass a UN Security Council resolution for authorization, prompting a new round of questioning of the organization's effectiveness. In the same decade, the Security Council intervened with peacekeepers in crises, including the War in Darfur in Sudan and the Kivu conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In 2013, an internal review of UN actions in the final battles of the Sri Lankan Civil War in 2009 concluded that the organization had suffered "systemic failure".
In November/December 2014, Egypt presented a motion proposing an expansion of the NPT, to include Israel and Iran; this proposal was due to increasing hostilities and destruction in the Middle-East connected to the Syrian Conflict as well as others. All members of the Security Council are signatory to the NPT, and all permanent members are nuclear weapons states.