Two UN Member States Are Sitting in the General Assembly Without a Vote. The Assembly Never Voted to Take It Away.
The United Nations General Assembly is the one body in the international system built on the flat proposition that every state counts the same. Article 18 of the Charter says each member has one vote, and that important questions — peace and security recommendations, elections to the Security Council, admission of new members — require a two-thirds majority of those present and voting. Nothing in that sentence is weighted by population, wealth or military power.
There is, however, one way to lose the vote, and it does not involve a debate, a resolution or a finding of misconduct. It involves an invoice.
The arithmetic penalty
Article 19 of the Charter provides that a member in arrears in the payment of its financial contributions shall have no vote in the General Assembly if the amount of its arrears equals or exceeds the amount of the contributions due from it for the preceding two full years. The provision is written as a consequence, not as a sanction to be imposed. There is no tribunal, no finding, no vote of censure. Once the arrears cross the two-year line, the vote is simply not there.
The Charter attaches a single escape hatch to the same article: the General Assembly may nevertheless permit such a member to vote if it is satisfied that the failure to pay is due to conditions beyond the control of the member. That is the only decision the Assembly actually takes. It does not vote to disenfranchise anyone. It votes, or declines to vote, to restore.
The United Nations maintains a running list. On the General Assembly's published Article 19 page, as it stood when consulted in September 2026, four member states were recorded as being in arrears at the level Article 19 describes: Afghanistan, Bolivia, Sao Tome and Principe, and Venezuela. Of those, Bolivia and Sao Tome and Principe were permitted to keep voting until the end of the Assembly's eightieth session under resolution 80/2, adopted on 14 October 2025. The underlying documentation is filed as A/80/474 and its addenda, running from Add.1 to Add.4 — a sequence of addenda being the usual sign that payments trickled in after the original letter went out.
Two states are therefore left on that list without the benefit of an exemption. What the Charter takes from them, on the face of the text, is narrow: Article 19 says the member “shall have no vote in the General Assembly”, and stops there. The provision says nothing about the Security Council, nothing about speaking rights, nothing about committee work and nothing about membership itself. That is a reading of the words, not a ruling by any organ — but the words are short, and they do not reach any further.
Where the number comes from
The two-year threshold only means something because there is a number to fall behind on, and the machinery that produces that number is one of the more elaborate arithmetical exercises in international organisation. Under Article 17, the General Assembly considers and approves the budget and apportions the expenses of the Organization among members. It does so on the advice of the Committee on Contributions, an expert body that meets annually for three to four weeks, usually in June, and whose mandate covers both the apportionment of expenses broadly according to capacity to pay and appeals under Article 19.
The Committee's own briefing on scale methodology, issued in June 2024, sets out the formula. Capacity to pay is proxied by gross national income, converted to US dollars at market exchange rates drawn from the IMF, with UN operational rates used where market rates are unavailable. The final scale is the arithmetic average of scales calculated over the most recent three-year and six-year base periods — a deliberate smoothing device, so that a single good or bad year does not swing a country's bill.
Two adjustments then pull the figures away from raw income. A debt-burden adjustment, available to member states with a per capita GNI below the World Bank threshold for high-income economies, works from the total external debt stock and assumes that debt is repaid over eight years; only principal is deducted, because interest is already captured in the income measure. A low per capita income adjustment reduces the share of states whose adjusted per capita income falls below the average per capita GNI of all member states, by 80 per cent of the shortfall — the so-called gradient — with the relief redistributed among everyone else.
A floor, a ceiling, and a political cap
The result is then clipped at both ends. The floor rate, unchanged since the 1998–2000 scale, is 0.001 per cent: no member pays less, however small its economy. The ceiling is 22 per cent, and a separate ceiling of 0.010 per cent applies to least developed countries.
That 22 per cent ceiling is the most consequential single number in the whole apparatus, and it is not a product of the formula at all. It is a maximum assessment rate fixed by the General Assembly rather than derived from capacity to pay, and on the methodology's own logic the difference has to be carried by the remaining membership. The formula measures capacity to pay; the ceiling then declines to charge the largest contributor whatever the formula would otherwise produce. The scale itself is revised for three-year periods.
Why the rule holds
Article 19 is unusual among the Charter's provisions because it is self-executing and cheap to enforce. No one has to be persuaded to apply it. The arrears are computed against the two-year figure, the annual letter goes to the President of the General Assembly, and the consequence in the text follows without anyone having to decide on it. Restoring the vote requires either a payment large enough to bring arrears back under the two-year line, or a decision by the whole membership that the failure to pay was genuinely beyond the state's control.
Both routes are used. The annual Article 19 letter, A/80/474, has run to four addenda, which is how the record tracks a list that changes during a session as payments arrive. The exemption route, meanwhile, is the Assembly acknowledging a fact it can hardly deny: that some members are in arrears because of conflict, sanctions, currency collapse or the simple absence of a functioning treasury, and that removing their vote punishes a population rather than a policy.
The design tells you something about what the founders thought the Assembly's vote was worth. They did not attach it to good behaviour, to compliance with resolutions, or to the observance of any obligation in the Charter's substantive chapters. They attached it to paying the bill — the one obligation an organisation with no revenue of its own cannot survive members ignoring.
