Permanent members of the UN Security Council use their hidden veto to control the Council’s agenda and prevent the Council from taking up certain issues. The Council never discusses crises that a P5 member considers to be within its own exclusive sphere of interest. Chechnya, Tibet, Xinjiang, Northern Ireland, Sudan, Uganda and Colombia figure among the forgotten conflicts that the Council ignores. Even in earlier days, when the formal veto was used much more frequently, hidden vetoes kept key issues such as colonial wars and Cold War conflicts off the agenda. The Security Council never debated the Algerian war or the partitioning of India because of the hidden vetoes of France and the UK. Nor did the Council take up US involvement in Vietnam or the Soviet war in Afghanistan even though hostilities continued for almost a decade after Moscow vetoed a draft resolution in 1980.

Libya and the ICJ: Clipping the Security Council’s Wings by David Ott (*), Middle East International, 13 March 1998 “Neither a victory nor a defeat” was British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook’s spin on the 27 February decision of the International … Read more . . .