UN Security Council veto: how it works and who can use it
How the UN Security Council veto works, who holds it in 2026, how often each power has used it, and why it now shapes the race for UN secretary-general.
Why it matters
Whether the UN acts on a war can come down to one vote from one of five countries. The same power is now deciding who will lead the UN from 2027.
One “no” from China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom or the United States kills a UN Security Council resolution, even if the other 14 members vote yes. That is the veto, and it decides whether the UN can impose sanctions, send peacekeepers or demand a ceasefire.
Quick answer: A Security Council resolution needs at least nine “yes” votes from the 15 members and no “no” vote from any of the five permanent members. A permanent member that abstains or stays away does not block the vote, and procedural decisions cannot be vetoed.
The idea is simple, and it explains a lot of headlines. When the Council stays silent on a war that dominates the news, a veto, or the threat of one, is usually the reason.
As of October 2026, the veto is also shaping the race to run the UN itself. In a straw poll on 16 October, none of the seven candidates to succeed Secretary-General Antonio Guterres had the backing of all five permanent members, the Associated Press reported.
What the UN Charter actually says about the veto
The word “veto” appears nowhere in the UN Charter. Article 27 gives each of the 15 members one vote and splits decisions into two kinds. Procedural decisions, such as adopting the agenda or inviting a country to speak, need nine votes. Everything else needs nine votes “including the concurring votes of the permanent members.”
Those last six words are the veto. A permanent member that votes no has not concurred, so the draft fails.
What makes the fight worth having is Article 25, under which every UN member agrees “to accept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council.” The General Assembly, where all 193 members sit, can only recommend. The Council can order, which is why its sanctions lists and arms embargoes bind countries that never voted on them.
The threshold has moved once. When the UN was founded, the Council had 11 members and a resolution needed seven votes. An amendment adopted by the General Assembly on 17 December 1963 enlarged the Council to 15 seats and raised the bar to nine. It came into force on 31 August 1965, and it remains the only change to the Council’s size.
Why an abstention is not a veto
Read literally, “concurring votes of the permanent members” could mean all five must vote yes. That is not how the Council has worked for decades.
From its early years, the Council treated a permanent member’s abstention as allowing a resolution to pass. The International Court of Justice confirmed the practice in its 1971 advisory opinion on Namibia, observing that a permanent member’s voluntary abstention had long been read as no obstacle to adoption.
Absence counts the same way. Between January and August 1950 the Soviet Union boycotted the Council in protest at Taiwan’s government holding China’s seat. During that boycott, in late June and early July 1950, the Council passed the resolutions that authorized the US-led defense of South Korea. Moscow could have blocked them by turning up. The Soviet delegate returned on 1 August.
This is the detail many explainers miss. A permanent member that dislikes a text but does not want to be blamed for killing it can abstain, and the resolution survives.
Who sits on the Security Council in 2026
Five seats are permanent. The General Assembly fills the other 10 for two-year terms, electing five countries each June by secret ballot with a two-thirds majority. A member that has just finished a term cannot be re-elected straight away, and elected members have no veto.
| Seat | Members | Term ends |
|---|---|---|
| Permanent (veto) | China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, United States | No end date |
| Elected for 2025 and 2026 | Denmark, Greece, Pakistan, Panama, Somalia | 31 Dec 2026 |
| Elected for 2026 and 2027 | Bahrain, Colombia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Latvia, Liberia | 31 Dec 2027 |
Source: UN Charter, Article 23; UN News and WAM reports on the June 2025 and June 2026 General Assembly elections.
On 3 June 2026 the Assembly chose Austria, Kyrgyzstan, Portugal, Trinidad and Tobago and Zimbabwe to take the first group’s seats on 1 January 2027. It will be Kyrgyzstan’s first term since it joined the UN in 1992.
Elected members are not powerless. Because a resolution needs nine “yes” votes, any seven of the 15 can sink a draft by voting no or abstaining, with no veto involved. Diplomats sometimes call this the “sixth veto.”
The two seats that hold the veto today were not held by the same governments in 1945. The Republic of China, based in Taiwan after 1949, held China’s seat until General Assembly resolution 2758 gave it to the People’s Republic on 25 October 1971. Russia has sat in the Soviet Union’s seat since the Soviet Union dissolved at the end of 1991.
How often has the veto been used?
The UN’s Dag Hammarskjöld Library keeps the official list. It starts on 16 February 1946, when the Soviet Union voted against a draft on the withdrawal of French and British troops from Syria and Lebanon. Its most recent entry, as of October 2026, is 7 April 2026.
A Daily Summit count of that list finds 247 occasions on which at least one permanent member voted no. Some occasions involved two vetoing countries, and some covered amendments or single paragraphs rather than a whole draft, which is why published totals vary.
| Permanent member | Occasions on the UN list (Feb 1946 to Apr 2026) | Most recent veto |
|---|---|---|
| Soviet Union / Russia | 140 | 17 Sep 2026 |
| United States | 95 | 18 Sep 2025 |
| United Kingdom | 30 | 23 Dec 1989 |
| China (both governments) | 20 | 17 Sep 2026 |
| France | 17 | 23 Dec 1989 |
Source: Dag Hammarskjöld Library veto list, counted by The Daily Summit in October 2026; the 17 September 2026 veto, reported by the AP and Al Jazeera, came after the list’s last update.
The United States cast its first veto on 17 March 1970, alongside Britain, on Southern Rhodesia. Since then it has used the veto more than any other member, most often on drafts it saw as harmful to Israel, according to Security Council Report, an independent research group in New York. Britain and France last used theirs on 23 December 1989, together with the United States, on a draft about the US invasion of Panama.
The timing tells a story the totals hide:
| Decade | Occasions on the UN list |
|---|---|
| 1940s (from 1946) | 44 |
| 1950s | 30 |
| 1960s | 19 |
| 1970s | 33 |
| 1980s | 50 |
| 1990s | 10 |
| 2000s | 14 |
| 2010s | 22 |
| 2020s (to April 2026) | 25 |
Source: Dag Hammarskjöld Library veto list, counted by The Daily Summit.
The 1990s were the quiet decade, when the end of the Cold War briefly made agreement easy. The 2020s had already passed the whole of the 2010s by April 2026. Security Council Report found that seven drafts were vetoed in 2024, the most in a single year since 1986.
The recent vetoes cluster on a few conflicts. Russia blocked more than 15 drafts on Syria between October 2011 and July 2023. The United States has vetoed repeatedly on Gaza: its 18 September 2025 veto, against a draft the other 14 members supported, was its sixth on the war, Reuters reported. In 2026, China and Russia together vetoed a Gulf-backed draft on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz on 7 April (11 votes in favor) and a US draft to keep a UN panel monitoring sanctions on Iran on 17 September (also 11 in favor).
The vetoes that never appear in the records
Counting vetoes undercounts their effect. Diplomats rarely put a draft to a vote when a permanent member has said it will block it. The text is dropped, or rewritten until it is weak enough to pass.
Security Council Report calls this the “pocket” or “hidden” veto. In a March 2026 research report, it noted that written records usually exist only when a draft is formally circulated, which tends to happen only when adoption looks likely. Threats are mostly documented as anecdotes. An academic study of the hidden veto by Mousa Zadeh and Jamshidi describes the same mechanism working in two ways: keeping items off the agenda and diluting the wording of those that reach it.
That matters when reading the news. A resolution that passes 15 to 0 may have been negotiated down to what the most reluctant permanent member would accept. Unanimity often hides a long list of deleted paragraphs.
What happens after a veto?
A veto ends the resolution, not the argument. Under General Assembly resolution 76/262, adopted without a vote on 26 April 2022, the Assembly’s president must call a formal debate within 10 working days of any veto. The vetoing country is invited to explain itself. The Assembly cannot overturn the veto, and its own resolutions are recommendations.
An older route dates to 3 November 1950, when the Assembly adopted the “Uniting for Peace” resolution. It lets the Assembly meet in an emergency session when the Council fails to act because the permanent members cannot agree. The Assembly used it during the Suez crisis in 1956 and has invoked it several times since.
Can the veto be limited or abolished?
On paper, yes. Article 108 says an amendment needs a two-thirds vote of the General Assembly and ratification by two-thirds of UN members, “including all the permanent members of the Security Council.” Any one of the five can block a change to its own power.
Reformers have tried softer routes. In 2015 a group of states known as the ACT group launched a code of conduct asking Council members not to vote against credible draft resolutions aimed at stopping genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes. France and Britain signed; China, Russia and the United States did not. A separate French and Mexican declaration asks only the five permanent members to hold back in mass-atrocity cases. The Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect counted 104 countries supporting it by July 2022. Both are voluntary.
Formal reform talks, the General Assembly’s Intergovernmental Negotiations, began in 2009. In July 2026 the Assembly rolled them over into its 81st session without a vote. The divisions are long-standing. Brazil, Germany, India and Japan seek permanent seats. The African Union’s Common African Position asks for two permanent African seats with the same rights as the current five, including the veto. Other states argue against any new permanent seats at all.
The obstacle is arithmetic as much as politics. Any reform needs 129 of 193 members to ratify, and all five veto holders among them.
Why the veto matters in the race for UN secretary-general
Article 97 says the secretary-general “shall be appointed by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council.” That recommendation is a Council decision, so each permanent member can block a candidate. Guterres’s second term ends on 31 December 2026.
The Council narrows the field through private straw polls in which members “encourage” or “discourage” each candidate. Since the 16 October round, permanent members have used colored ballots, so candidates can see whether a “discourage” vote came from a member with a veto. In that round, Rebeca Grynspan of Costa Rica received nine “encourage” votes, but two permanent members discouraged her, according to the AP and the UN-focused news site PassBlue.
Watch for: further straw polls before the end of the year, then a formal Council vote on one name and a General Assembly vote to appoint. US Ambassador Mike Waltz has said he is confident the choice will be made “before the end of the year.” The number to keep in mind is nine: a candidate, like any resolution, needs nine votes and no veto.
