The UN Charter says substantive Security Council decisions need “the concurring votes of the permanent members”. Since 1946 the Council has read an abstention as concurrence anyway

by Meera Pillai · September 10, 2026

Politics & Policy Editor, The Globe Ledger

Almost every account of the United Nations Security Council contains the same shorthand: the five permanent members hold a veto, and a veto is a vote against. The shorthand is accurate as far as it goes, but it describes a practice rather than a provision. The provision says something else, and the difference between the two is where a great deal of Council business actually happens.

The governing text is Article 27 of the Charter of the United Nations. In the version published by the United Nations today, its second paragraph reads: “Decisions of the Security Council on procedural matters shall be made by an affirmative vote of nine members.” The third paragraph reads: “Decisions of the Security Council on all other matters shall be made by an affirmative vote of nine members including the concurring votes of the permanent members; provided that, in decisions under Chapter VI, and under paragraph 3 of Article 52, a party to a dispute shall abstain from voting.” Nothing in that sentence mentions abstention by a permanent member. Read strictly, the operative clause appears to require five affirmative permanent-member votes for anything that is not procedural. The proviso at the end, which is about something quite different, is dealt with below.

The wording is also older than the numbers suggest. The Charter signed at San Francisco in 1945, as reproduced in the United Nations Treaty Collection, set both thresholds at seven votes, not nine, and Article 23(1) then provided that “the Security Council shall consist of eleven Members of the United Nations”. The United Nations records that amendments to Articles 23, 27 and 61 were adopted by the General Assembly on 17 December 1963 and entered into force on 31 August 1965. The amendment to Article 23 enlarged the Security Council from eleven members to fifteen; the amendment to Article 27 raised both voting thresholds from seven to nine; the amendment to Article 61 concerned a different organ altogether, enlarging the Economic and Social Council from eighteen members to twenty-seven. Article 109 was amended separately: adopted 20 December 1965, in force 12 June 1968, raising the Council vote needed to convene a Charter review conference from seven to nine, while paragraph 3 of that article was left with its original reference to “a vote of any seven members of the Security Council”.

What the 1963 amendment to Article 27 did not do was touch the phrase “the concurring votes of the permanent members”, or add any reference to abstention. It changed a number and nothing else. Nor did the amendments update the roster in Article 23(1), which in the text the United Nations publishes still names “the Republic of China” and “the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” among the permanent members — a reminder that the Charter is amended rarely and successor states have been handled by practice rather than by redrafting.

The practice on abstention began almost immediately. The original volume of the Repertory of Practice of United Nations Organs, the Secretariat's compilation of how Charter articles have actually been applied, records that “during the period 1946-1954, sixty-four decisions of a seemingly non-procedural character were adopted by the Council by a vote in which one or more of the permanent members abstained.” The first supplement, covering the following two years, records that “during the period under review the Council adopted four decisions by a vote in which one or more of the permanent members abstained” — the admissions of Albania, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria on 14 December 1955 — and sets out the reasoning: permanent members took the view that no affirmative decision could have been taken had the privileged vote or votes been cast against the proposal, and the supplement states that such an abstention, otherwise than in accordance with the proviso of Article 27(3), does not preclude fulfilment of the Charter's requirement of an affirmative decision by the Council.

The Repertory also records that the practice was contested. In a decision of 4 March 1949 concerning the admission of Israel, the President — Cuba — declared the resolution adopted and observed that in accordance “with the principle established by the Security Council”, abstention by a permanent member did not render the Council's decision invalid. Certain elected members expressed doubts about that reading of Article 27(3), contending that the draft resolution had not been supported by all five permanent members as the paragraph requires, and that the Council can “not establish principles to modify the Charter”. The Repertory records that no formal challenge was made to the President's ruling, and refers to the practice being supported by presidential rulings and by statements of permanent members of the Council.

The question eventually reached the International Court of Justice. In the 1971 advisory proceedings on the legal consequences of South Africa's continued presence in Namibia, South Africa argued among its preliminary objections that the Security Council resolution requesting the opinion — resolution 284 (1970) — was invalid because two permanent members had abstained. The Court dealt with the objections in the section of its Opinion of 21 June 1971 running from paragraph 19 to paragraph 41. Its published summary records the reasoning: “for a long period the voluntary abstention of a permanent member has consistently been interpreted as not constituting a bar to the adoption of resolutions by the Security Council.”

That formulation is worth reading closely, because it does not claim the Charter text says what the Council does. It rests the answer on consistent interpretation over a long period, accepted by the membership — the classic route by which a subsequent practice hardens into the accepted meaning of a treaty provision. The Charter was not rewritten; the reading of it settled.

The Council's own public materials now describe the position in these terms. The Security Council's page on its voting system states that if a permanent member “does not fully agree with a proposed resolution but does not wish to cast a veto, it may choose to abstain, thus allowing the resolution to be adopted if it obtains the required number of nine favourable votes.” Abstention is therefore not a lesser veto or a partial one. It is procedurally identical, in effect, to voting yes, while carrying a political signal that is anything but.

A second distinction in Article 27 is equally load-bearing and equally easy to miss. There is no veto on procedural matters. The Dag Hammarskjöld Library's guide to Council voting sets out the practical test: if a permanent member casts a negative vote and the motion is nonetheless adopted, the matter was procedural in nature. That is why fights over whether an item goes on the agenda, or whether a meeting is convened, are fought as classification disputes rather than as votes on the merits.

Article 27(3) also carries a proviso that most summaries omit entirely. The full paragraph ends: “provided that, in decisions under Chapter VI, and under paragraph 3 of Article 52, a party to a dispute shall abstain from voting.” Chapter VI covers the pacific settlement of disputes; Article 52(3) concerns the referral of local disputes to regional arrangements. On its face this is a duty of abstention imposed on any Council member, permanent or elected, that is itself a party to the dispute in question — a compulsory recusal written into the voting rule. Its practical bite depends on whether a given draft is characterised as falling under Chapter VI, which is itself a contested question in the Council's practice.

None of this makes the veto reformable from inside the Council. Article 108 provides that Charter amendments come into force when adopted by two-thirds of the General Assembly and ratified by two-thirds of the Members “including all the permanent members of the Security Council”. Any amendment abolishing or limiting the veto would therefore need the ratification of every state holding it. That is why proposals for change have concentrated on accountability rather than on the vote itself.

The most concrete of those is General Assembly resolution 76/262, titled “Standing mandate for a General Assembly debate when a veto is cast in the Security Council”, adopted without a vote on 26 April 2022. The Security Council's own Repertoire, in its supplement covering 2023, describes the mechanism: the President of the General Assembly convenes a formal meeting of the Assembly within ten working days of a veto being cast in the Council to discuss the situation, and the Council was invited to submit a special report on the use of that veto to the Assembly at least 72 hours before the discussion. The resolution creates a debate, not a review. It cannot overturn a vetoed draft.

It is worth being precise about what this article does not establish. This desk did not obtain, from a document it opened, an authoritative running total of vetoes cast since 1946; the United Nations maintains a veto dataset described as covering all vetoes cast by the five permanent members since 1946 in accordance with Article 27(3), but the page consulted carried no total. Any figure quoted here would be an estimate, and estimates are not what this column is for.

What can be stated exactly is the shape of the rule. The Charter's substantive voting provision has required “the concurring votes of the permanent members” since 1945, and the only amendment it has received changed a numeral. Since 1946 it has been applied as though a permanent member that abstains has not withheld concurrence in the sense that blocks a decision; on the Council's own account, only a negative vote does that. The text was never brought into line with the practice. Whether it should be is a question on which member states disagree sharply and on which this column takes no position; what Article 108 establishes is only that any amendment would require ratification by every state that holds the vote in question.