Reform of the UN Security Council

The Security Council is the only organ of the United Nations whose decisions bind all 193 member states, and the only one whose composition has barely moved since it was designed. Every member state, including all five permanent members, now says publicly that it must be enlarged. What more than three decades of formal negotiation have not produced is a single line of agreed text. Council reform is therefore less a debate about whether than a study in why an agreed diagnosis has never yielded an agreed cure.

What this note takes as given

• The Council’s composition, its Chapter VI and Chapter VII powers, its working methods and the legal record of the veto are treated in their own right elsewhere; this note assumes them and goes straight to the question of changing them.
• Three facts do the work here: the Council has fifteen members, five of them permanent, with the veto; Article 27(3) requires nine affirmative votes including the concurring votes of the permanent members on substantive questions; and the last time the Council changed shape was 1965.
• The collective-security design the Charter drew from the League’s failure likewise belongs to a separate treatment. What matters here is its consequence: a Council built to work only when the great powers agree becomes an argument for redesign the moment they stop agreeing.

Three arguments for reform, and why they do not stand or fall together

The case for reform is usually presented as one argument. It is three, and they point in different directions. Representation is about who sits. Legitimacy is about whether decisions are accepted as binding by those who do not sit. Effectiveness is about whether the Council can act at all. Separating them matters because a change that fixes one can worsen another, and the reform debate has never honestly confronted that.

Representation: the arithmetic of 1945

• The Council encodes the distribution of power and the membership of 1945, and both have changed beyond recognition while the Council has changed once. Membership has gone from 51 states to 193; the Council has gone from eleven to fifteen, in a single amendment sixty years ago.
• Africa has 54 member states — more than a quarter of the membership — well over 1.4 billion people, and no permanent seat. It holds three of the ten elected seats, so 28% of the membership occupies 20% of the Council.
• Latin America and the Caribbean has 33 member states and no permanent seat, holding two elected seats.
• Asia and the Pacific has 53 member states and roughly 60% of humanity, and one permanent seat — China — plus two elected seats.
• Europe, counted with Russia, holds three of the five permanent seats on about 9% of the world’s population; without Russia, two of five. Western Europe and Eastern Europe together hold 51 member states and three permanent seats; Africa and Latin America together hold 87 member states and none.
• Africa is at once the least represented region and the Council’s largest subject. In 2023 African situations accounted for roughly 38% of the Council’s meetings and 51% of its formal outcomes, and most deployed peacekeepers serve in African missions. The states most acted upon have the least say in the acting.
• The imbalance is not only regional. The Arab states, the whole of Central and Eastern Europe outside Russia, the Caribbean and the small island developing states have never held permanent membership, and several have never held an elected seat at all.

The Council’s least represented region supplies half its business; the region that supplies almost none of its business holds three of its five permanent seats.

Legitimacy: consent, compliance and the bypass problem

• Article 25 obliges every member to “accept and carry out” the Council’s decisions, which makes the Council the only body in the system that can generate binding obligations without the consent of those bound. A body of fifteen legislating for 193 needs a theory of representation, and the Charter never supplied one.
• The permanent five are accountable to no electorate within the system. Elected members answer to the General Assembly every two years; permanent members answer to nothing. This is what makes the Council structurally different from every other international body of comparable authority.
• The transparency deficit compounds the representation deficit. Much of the Council’s real work happens in informal consultations that are unminuted and closed, penholding on most files rests with three permanent members, and coordination with the General Assembly is thin — so the states outside the Council are neither represented in it nor reliably informed by it.
• Legitimacy deficits become compliance deficits. Where states regard a decision as the product of a body that does not represent them, compliance becomes discretionary — sanctions leak, mandates are ignored, and the Council’s own resolutions are treated as bargaining positions rather than law.
• The bypass problem is the practical cost. When the Council will not act, states act outside it — coalitions of the willing, regional organisations, unilateral force, and increasingly minilateral formats such as the G20, the expanded BRICS and the Quad. Each bypass is defensible alone and corrosive in aggregate.
• Rohan Mukherjee makes the point that answers the sceptics: international legitimacy depends less on an institution’s performance than on its inclusivity and perceived fairness, and performance itself declines as legitimacy falls. Representation is then not a luxury added to effectiveness but a precondition of it.

Effectiveness: the veto and the incapable Council

• The veto makes the Council structurally incapable precisely where the stakes are highest. It is not a random constraint; it bites hardest where a permanent member or its client is a party, which is where the largest wars are.
• Syria since 2011, Ukraine since February 2022 and Gaza since October 2023 are the standing exhibits: on each of the three largest armed conflicts of the period the Council has been unable to adopt the decisions its own Charter contemplates.
• The pattern has worsened rather than eased. 2024 saw eight vetoes cast against seven draft resolutions — the most since 1986; 2025 saw four, two cast by the United States on Gaza drafts and two by Russia on Ukraine amendments. Since 2020 all but two American vetoes have concerned Israel and Palestine.
• Incapacity is self-reinforcing. A Council that cannot act is bypassed; a Council that is bypassed loses the practice and the expectation of being used; and a Council that is not used cannot recover authority by argument.

The tension the reform debate avoids

• The reforms that would make the Council more representative would not obviously make it more effective, and enlargement may make it less so. This is the honest difficulty at the centre of the subject and most advocacy simply steps over it.
• Alexandra Novosseloff states the trade-off plainly: a large expansion could well increase the Council’s authority and legitimacy while decreasing its efficiency and effectiveness. A body of twenty-six negotiating a ceasefire text under time pressure is not obviously quicker than a body of fifteen.
• The deeper objection is about purpose. The Council was arguably never intended to be representative — that is the General Assembly’s function — but to harness and restrain the great powers, which needs a small body containing them. Adding members who cannot underwrite decisions adds voices, not capability.
• The counter-argument is that the trade-off is misdescribed. Speed has never been the Council’s binding constraint; great-power disagreement has. Enlargement without veto extension changes the number of voices, not the number of vetoes — so the paralysis case is unaffected, while the legitimacy gain is real.
• The practical consequence of this tension is a preference for the second-best. If enlargement cannot be shown to improve capability, the reforms that plausibly can — working methods, veto restraint, penholding, transparency — become the more defensible investment. This is the strongest argument available against making membership the centre of the reform agenda.

The great-power test on its own terms

If permanent membership tracks the capacity to underwrite international order, the present five are a poor fit. Two of them are mid-sized European powers, and several non-members outperform incumbents on the criteria the incumbents themselves invoke.

Criterion	Where the incumbents stand	Where the principal aspirants stand
Economic weight	France and the United Kingdom sit outside the world’s top four economies; Russia’s economy is smaller than Italy’s in nominal terms	Germany, Japan and India are all within the world’s top six economies by nominal output; India is third by purchasing power parity
Military capacity	The United Kingdom and France rank sixth and ninth among world military spenders	Germany fourth, India fifth, Japan tenth; India fields one of the two largest standing armies
Population	The United Kingdom and France together are about 1.6% of humanity	India alone is about 18%; Brazil, Japan and Germany add a further 5%
Financial contribution	The United States is the largest assessed contributor at the 22% ceiling; the United Kingdom and France are fifth and sixth	Japan and Germany have long been the second and third largest funders, displaced from second only when China overtook Japan
Operational contribution	The five permanent members together contribute fewer uniformed peacekeepers than India does alone	India is the largest cumulative troop contributor in UN history; Brazil, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Rwanda and Pakistan are among the largest current contributors

• The test cuts both ways, which is why it is rarely pressed to its conclusion. If capability is the criterion, some states should be removed as well as added — and no proposal has ever suggested removing a permanent member, because none could pass.
• The nuclear criterion has similarly eroded. All five permanent members are nuclear-weapon states recognised by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but four states outside the Treaty now possess weapons, so the correlation between the permanent five and the nuclear order is no longer exact either.

The history of the attempt

The reform debate is older than most of the states demanding it. Its shape has been set by one successful amendment, one wasted opportunity and a long procedural retreat from substance into machinery.

1945: the veto forced through, and the review that never came

• The veto was contested at San Francisco and carried by ultimatum, not argument. Smaller states — Australia, New Zealand, Cuba, Egypt and several Latin American delegations — attacked the unanimity rule directly; the sponsoring powers made plain that there would be no organisation without it, and the clause survived.
• The San Francisco Statement by the four sponsoring governments, issued to settle what the veto covered, broadened it: whether a matter is procedural or substantive was itself made substantive — the origin of the double veto, unused since 1959 and still a target of reform.
• The Charter contemplated its own revision from the outset. Article 109(3) provided that if a general review conference had not been held before the tenth annual session of the General Assembly, the proposal to call one would be placed automatically on that session’s agenda.
• The 1955 attempt went nowhere. The Assembly adopted resolution 992 (X), deciding in principle that a review conference should be held and appointing a committee to settle time and place.
  • The committee met, deferred and was allowed to lapse; the Cold War made reopening the Charter unthinkable to both blocs. The one mechanism built for systematic revision has never been used.

1963–65: the only reform that has ever succeeded

• The single successful amendment of the Council was driven by decolonisation. Membership had risen from 51 to over 110 as African and Asian states joined, and the Council’s regional arithmetic had become indefensible.
• General Assembly resolution 1991 A (XVIII), adopted 17 December 1963, amended Articles 23, 27 and 61: elected members from six to ten, the Council from eleven to fifteen, and the majority for a decision from seven votes to nine.
  • It entered into force on 31 August 1965. The amendment is routinely misdated to 1963, which is the year of adoption, not of effect.
• The same amendment enlarged ECOSOC from eighteen to twenty-seven; a further amendment adopted in 1971 took it to fifty-four, in force in 1973.
• The decisive fact is political, not legal: the Soviet Union and France initially opposed the enlargement and both later ratified — because an Assembly permanently hostile to the Council’s composition was worse for them than a modest expansion of seats they did not hold.
• 1965 is therefore the standing proof that the amendment route is not literally impossible. It is also the standing warning, because what made it possible was that no permanent member lost anything. Every proposal since has asked a permanent member to give something up.

1979–1993: an agenda item that never left the agenda

• In 1979 India and a group of non-aligned states requested inscription of the item “Question of equitable representation on and increase in the membership of the Security Council”. India’s ambassador Brajesh Mishra and his co-sponsors sought elected membership of fourteen, arguing from the organisation’s growth alone.
• The item was inscribed and then deferred, year after year, from 1980 to 1991 — a period in which no permanent member had any interest in reopening the question and the Assembly had no capacity to force it.
• The end of the Cold War revived it. Resolution 47/62 of 11 December 1992 invited member states to submit written views on Council review, and the responses made clear that expansion had majority support in principle and none in detail.
• Resolution 48/26 of 3 December 1993 created the Open-Ended Working Group, mandated to consider the future size of the Council, the categories and criteria of membership and the veto, in two clusters — expansion and working methods.
• The Working Group met for fifteen years and agreed nothing, acquiring the nickname the “never-ending working group”. Its one durable achievement was procedural: it established that reform would be handled in the Assembly, by all members, rather than negotiated among the powerful.

1997: the Razali Plan

• The first fully worked proposal came from Razali Ismail of Malaysia, then President of the General Assembly, in March 1997.
• The model: a Council of twenty-four. Five new permanent members without the veto — two from the industrialised states and three from the developing world, one each from Africa, Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean — plus four new elected seats.
• Its innovation was procedural. Razali proposed a three-stage adoption: first a framework resolution setting out the structure by a two-thirds majority of those present and voting; then the election of the new members; then the Charter amendments themselves, requiring the full Article 108 majority and ratification.
• The sequencing was the plan’s point and its undoing. Splitting the decision let states commit to a design before naming its occupants — but opponents saw that the first vote would create momentum the later, harder votes could not resist. Uniting for Consensus formed in 1995 in anticipation of exactly this.
• The plan was never put to a vote, and its lasting consequence was the opposite of what it intended.
  • In resolution 53/30 of November 1998 the Assembly decided that nothing on Council reform would be adopted without the affirmative vote of at least two-thirds of the membership — not of those present and voting. That raised the bar permanently.

2004–05: the year everything was on the table

• The High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, appointed by Kofi Annan and chaired by Anand Panyarachun, reported in December 2004 as A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility. It set out two models, deliberately declining to choose between them, both taking the Council to twenty-four.
• Model A: six new permanent seats without the veto, distributed two to Africa, two to Asia and the Pacific, one to Europe and one to the Americas, plus three new two-year elected seats.
• Model B: no new permanent seats at all, but a new intermediate category of eight seats renewable every four years, two in each of the four regional areas, plus one further non-renewable two-year seat.
• Both models refused to extend the veto, and the Panel described the veto itself as having “an anachronistic character” unsuited to the institution in the twenty-first century while conceding that its removal was not achievable.
• Annan pressed the choice in In Larger Freedom (March 2005), urging member states to adopt one model or the other, or any variant, and to take the decision before the September World Summit — explicitly warning that indefinite deferral was itself a decision.

Why 2005 failed

Three draft resolutions were tabled within five months and none was put to a vote. The failure is the single most instructive episode in the subject, because everything necessary for reform was present except agreement.

Draft	Sponsors	Model	Fate
A/59/L.64	The G4 — Brazil, Germany, India, Japan	Council of 25: six new permanent seats (two Africa, two Asia, one Western Europe and Others, one Latin America and the Caribbean) plus four new elected seats; veto deferred for fifteen years	Lapsed without a vote
A/59/L.67	The African Union	Council of 26: two permanent seats for Africa with the veto, plus five elected seats, occupants chosen by the African Union	Lapsed without a vote
A/59/L.68	Uniting for Consensus	Council of 25: ten new elected seats only, two-year terms with immediate re-election permitted	Lapsed without a vote

• The three drafts split the two-thirds that any one of them needed. Each commanded substantial support; none commanded the 129 votes required; and every state that preferred a rival text was a state the leading text could not win.
• The African Union would not drop the veto demand. Repeated G4–African Union talks foundered on it: the G4 had already conceded a fifteen-year deferral to attract Western support, and Africa’s position was that a seat without the veto is a second-class seat. Neither side could move without losing its coalition.
• The United States opposed any expansion of the veto and, in the same period, made clear it would support only a very limited enlargement — a position that ruled out the African text outright.
• China worked actively against Japan, mobilising opinion during a period of acute Sino-Japanese friction, and made clear it would not accept Japanese permanent membership. Since any amendment requires Chinese ratification, this alone was sufficient.
• What emerged instead was a single anodyne paragraph. The 2005 World Summit Outcome (resolution 60/1) supported “early reform of the Security Council” and asked the Assembly to review progress — language committing no one to anything, and the strongest text agreed before 2024.

2006–09: from the working group to the Intergovernmental Negotiations

• The aftermath pushed reform energy towards working methods, the one track needing no Charter amendment.
  • The Small Five — Costa Rica, Jordan, Liechtenstein, Singapore and Switzerland — tabled proposals in 2006 and 2012 on transparency, access for non-members and veto restraint in atrocity situations. Both were withdrawn without a vote under pressure from the permanent members.
  • The Council’s own presidential note S/2006/507 absorbed part of the agenda in diluted form.
• In 2007 the L.69 group forced the pace by tabling a draft calling for expansion in both categories, which nearly collapsed the Working Group’s mandate; the compromise that saved it substituted the language of “intergovernmental negotiations” for further working-group discussion.
• Decision 62/557 of 15 September 2008 launched the Intergovernmental Negotiations (IGN), moving reform out of the Working Group and into an informal plenary of the whole Assembly. Negotiations began in February 2009.
• The decision fixed the five clusters that have organised every session since: categories of membership; the question of the veto; regional representation; the size of an enlarged Council and its working methods; and the relationship between the Council and the General Assembly.
• It also fixed the rule that has frozen the process: the five issues are “interlinked”, and nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. Presented as a guarantee of comprehensiveness, it lets any state block a soluble cluster by withholding agreement on an insoluble one — and the veto cluster is insoluble.

2015: the framework document, and the myth of text-based negotiations

• On 14 September 2015 the Assembly adopted decision 69/560 by consensus, deciding to continue the negotiations in the following session and to carry forward a framework document compiling the positions and proposals of member states, circulated on 31 July 2015.
• This is routinely described as the move to “text-based negotiations”. It was not. The framework document compiles member-state positions by cluster, recording every incompatible proposal side by side. It is not a draft, not negotiable line by line, and no one had to agree to a word of it.
• The decision’s own accompanying analysis identified elements of convergence on only two of the five clusters — the Council–Assembly relationship and size and working methods — and listed more than twenty issues requiring further consideration.
• Eleven years later there is still no negotiating text. The 2026 session was still discussing how to construct a “consolidated model” as a precursor to text-based negotiation, which had therefore not begun. Reference material that presents 2015 as a breakthrough has mistaken a procedural formula for a substantive one.

Thirty-three years of formal consideration and seventeen years of negotiation have produced a compilation of positions and not one line of agreed text.

2024–2026: the Pact for the Future and the present state of play

• The Pact for the Future, adopted 22 September 2024 as resolution 79/1, carries the strongest language on Council reform the membership has ever agreed: it commits states to redress “the historical injustice against Africa” as a priority, treating African representation as the first-order question rather than one claim among several.
• What the Pact does not do is agree a model — no numbers, no categories, no timetable. Its significance is that it makes Africa’s claim the organising principle of the negotiation, which changes the terms on which every other bloc must argue.
• The IGN’s co-chairs for the eightieth session are Tareq Albanai of Kuwait and Lise Gregoire-van Haaren of the Netherlands. Their elements paper of June 2026, revised in July, is the fullest available statement of where the negotiation actually stands.
• Recorded convergence now covers five points.
  • That the Council must be enlarged, to 21–27 seats, in the “low to mid-20s”.
  • That expansion of the two-year elected category is accepted by every member state.
  • That the Article 27(3) voting ratio should be preserved in proportion.
  • That enhanced African representation is a priority.
  • That there is support for a rotating cross-regional seat for small island developing states, with most proposals clustering around three further seats for Africa, three for Asia and the Pacific and two for Latin America and the Caribbean.
• Recorded divergence: whether the permanent category should be expanded at all; whether new permanent members would hold the veto, be denied it, or have the question deferred; how regional seats would be selected and to whom their occupants answer; and whether members sit in a national or regional capacity.
• The co-chairs’ bridging concept is “fixed regional seats” — permanent seats allocated to regions rather than states, on longer renewable terms with the same privileges as existing permanent members, subject to periodic review, the occupant serving in its national capacity. Reactions divided: some explored it, others called bridging premature.
• In July 2026 the Assembly again decided to continue the negotiations into the eighty-first session. The African Group pressed for the African model as the primary reference for a consolidated text; Uniting for Consensus insisted convergence must precede consolidation. The disagreement is about method, and it is the same one as in 1997.

The blocs and their models

Reform is not a contest between reformers and defenders of the status quo. It is a contest among reformers, each with a model that suits its own position, and it is their mutual incompatibility rather than P5 obstruction alone that has kept the question open.

The G4: Brazil, Germany, India, Japan

• Formed in 2004 to coordinate four separate claims into one, the G4 rests on mutual endorsement: each member supports the other three, converting four contested bids into a single package.
• Their 2005 model remains the reference point for expansion in both categories.
  • Six new permanent seats — two for Africa, two for Asia, one for Western Europe and Others, one for Latin America and the Caribbean.
  • Four or five new elected seats, taking the Council to twenty-five or twenty-six.
  • A mandatory review after a fixed period, to reassess the arrangement including the veto question.
• The fifteen-year deferral of the veto was the central concession. New permanent members would hold the veto in principle but undertake not to exercise it until a review decided the question — designed to answer Western objections without conceding the inequality of a permanent seat without prerogatives.
• The case for the four is that they are the states most obviously missing on the criteria the Council itself uses.
  • Japan and Germany have been the second and third largest assessed contributors for most of the organisation’s modern history.
  • India is the largest cumulative troop contributor in the history of UN peacekeeping and the world’s most populous state.
  • Brazil is the largest state and economy of South America, and has served on the Council more often than any other Latin American member.
• The P5’s positions on the four are not uniform, and the claim that all five support all four is false.

Aspirant	United States	United Kingdom	France	Russia	China
India	Support expressed for permanent membership, without the veto	Support expressed	Support expressed	Support repeatedly expressed	Never endorsed; supports “greater representation for developing countries” without naming India
Japan	Support expressed	Support expressed	Support expressed	Cool, and cooler since 2022	Opposed, actively so since 2005
Germany	Support expressed	Support expressed	Support expressed	Cool	Sceptical; argues a third Western European permanent seat worsens the imbalance
Brazil	Support expressed	Support expressed	Support expressed	Support expressed	Least opposed of the four, but no endorsement of the G4 package

• China’s position is the operative one, because ratification requires it. Zhang Guihong summarises it as support for adding seats for developing countries combined with opposition to any specific country becoming a new permanent member — a formula that can be repeated indefinitely without ever endorsing anyone.
• The G4’s structural weakness is that it is a package. As Sanjay Baru argues, tying India’s claim to Japan’s and Germany’s limits its room to negotiate separately, because each partner brings its own dedicated opponent into the coalition’s path.

Uniting for Consensus, the “Coffee Club”

• Formed in 1995 around Italy, and given its formal name in 2005, the group exists to prevent new permanent members and insists that any enlargement be adopted by consensus rather than by a bare two-thirds.
• The core movers are Italy and Pakistan, together with Argentina, Mexico, South Korea, Spain, Turkey, Canada, Colombia and Malta; San Marino, Costa Rica and others have been associated at various times.
• Its 2005 proposal was a Council of twenty-five, with ten new elected seats only, two-year terms with immediate re-election permitted — so that states with the capacity and the will to serve could in practice serve continuously, without acquiring an entitlement.
• A later variant offers longer-term seats of three to five years, in some formulations renewable and in others not, as a middle category between the two-year seat and permanence.
• The argument deserves to be taken on its merits, because it is not merely obstruction.
  • New permanent members would be regional hegemons, not regional representatives. No one has appointed India to speak for Asia or Nigeria for Africa; a permanent seat converts a state’s own interest into a permanent structural advantage over its neighbours.
  • Enlargement of the permanent category entrenches inequality rather than diluting it. Adding six states to a privileged tier makes eleven privileged states and 182 unprivileged ones; the principle being objected to is reproduced, not corrected.
  • Accountability comes only from periodic election. As Miguel Ruiz Cabañas Izquierdo puts it, expanding the elected category produces a more egalitarian and globally representative Council, because every member must return to the Assembly and justify itself.
  • Consensus rather than a bare majority protects the losing minority from a permanent constitutional change carried by a coalition of 128 against 65.
• The obvious objection: principle and interest are indistinguishable here. Every core member has a regional rival among the aspirants — Pakistan against India, Italy and Spain against Germany, Argentina and Mexico against Brazil, South Korea against Japan. The arguments would be identical if the motives were purely self-interested, which is why they persuade so few.

The African position: Ezulwini, Sirte and the C-10

• The Ezulwini Consensus, adopted by the African Union’s Executive Council in March 2005, remains Africa’s common position and has never been amended.
  • Not fewer than two permanent seats, with all the prerogatives and privileges of current permanent members, including the veto.
  • Five non-permanent seats, up from the present three.
  • The African Union itself selects the occupants, before they stand for election in the Assembly.
• The Sirte Declaration of July 2005 reaffirmed the same demand at heads-of-state level, and the position was tabled as a rival draft to the G4’s in the same season.
• Africa’s veto demand is about equality, not about the veto. The Ezulwini text opposes the veto in principle and adds that so long as it exists it must be available to all permanent members — otherwise reform creates two classes of permanent member and writes the historical injustice into the new arrangement.
• This is what makes the African position hardest to reconcile with everyone else’s. The G4 has conceded a deferral; the United States refuses any extension of the veto; the Union cannot drop the demand without abandoning its own reasoning. The strongest moral claim in the negotiation is attached to its least negotiable condition.
• The Common African Position is coordinated by the Committee of Ten (C-10), ten heads of state and government — Algeria, the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Kenya, Libya, Namibia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Uganda and Zambia — mandated to advocate the position internationally, with Sierra Leone as coordinator.
• The unresolved internal question is which two states would sit.
  • Nigeria claims the largest population and economy; South Africa the strongest continental diplomatic record; Egypt the longest standing and the Arab connection; Kenya and Algeria substantial regional claims of their own.
  • As Sithembile Mbete observes, the Union must get its own house in order first — and it has avoided doing so because naming two states would fracture the consensus that gives the position its force.
• In 2026 the African Group submitted its model formally to the negotiations and pressed for it to be the primary reference for any consolidated text — the most assertive procedural move Africa has made in the process.

The L.69 group

• Named after the draft resolution it tabled in 2007, the group is a cross-regional coalition of about thirty-two developing countries from Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and the Pacific.
• It argues for expansion in both categories — permanent and non-permanent — and for a Council that is accountable, representative, transparent and relevant, its own formulation.
• India’s Permanent Mission serves as its secretariat, which makes L.69 the principal vehicle through which India builds Assembly numbers outside the G4.
• Members include India, Brazil, South Africa, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Bhutan, Venezuela, Mongolia, Haiti, Saint Lucia and Seychelles, among others. Its significance is arithmetic: it links the G4’s claim to the small-state and African constituencies whose votes any two-thirds majority requires.

The Arab Group and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation

• The Arab Group presses for a permanent Arab seat, and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation for guaranteed representation of the Muslim world in any enlarged Council.
• The argument is drawn from the Council’s own agenda. West Asia and North Africa generate a large share of its business — Palestine, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Libya are among its longest files — while the region has never held permanent membership.
• The claim cuts across the regional-group framework, since Arab states sit in both the African and the Asia-Pacific groups, so an Arab seat cannot be created by allocating seats to regions alone. This is one reason the regional-representation cluster has proved harder than it looks.

The small states: CARICOM, the SIDS and the ACT group

• The Caribbean Community and the Pacific small island developing states press for a dedicated seat on the argument that a category of states whose survival is directly at stake in the Council’s security agenda has effectively never been represented on it.
• The co-chairs’ 2026 paper records support for a rotating cross-regional seat for small island developing states — the only genuinely new seat category to gain broad backing in the negotiations in years.
• The ACT group — Accountability, Coherence and Transparency — takes the opposite strategic bet. Founded in May 2013 as a cross-regional group of some twenty-seven small and mid-sized states, growing out of the earlier Small Five, it works deliberately on working methods and veto restraint rather than membership.
  • The calculation: these are achievable without a Charter amendment, since the Council’s working methods are largely its own to set and the veto can be constrained by undertaking rather than by law.
  • The record supports the calculation. The Code of Conduct and the 2022 veto initiative are the only concrete changes the reform debate has produced in two decades, and neither required a single ratification.

The blocs compared

Bloc	Core proposal	New permanent seats	Position on the veto	Size of enlarged Council	Principal supporters
G4	Expansion in both categories	Six, including two for Africa	New members to hold it, exercise deferred fifteen years	25–26	Brazil, Germany, India, Japan; France, the UK, much of Africa and L.69
Uniting for Consensus	Expansion of the elected category only	None	No extension; restraint urged on the existing five	25	Italy, Pakistan, Argentina, Mexico, South Korea, Spain, Turkey, Canada, Colombia, Malta
African Union (Ezulwini)	Expansion in both categories, Africa first	Two for Africa, with full prerogatives	Veto for all permanent members, or for none	26	The 54 African states, the C-10
L.69	Expansion in both categories	Both categories expanded; no fixed number	Aligned with abolition or extension, against a two-tier outcome	Around 25–27	About 32 developing states across four regions
Arab Group and OIC	A permanent Arab and Muslim-world presence	At least one	Follows the African and G4 positions	Not fixed	Arab League, OIC members
CARICOM and the SIDS	A dedicated small-island seat	None sought	Not a priority	Not fixed	Caribbean and Pacific small states
ACT group	Working methods and veto restraint, not membership	None sought	Voluntary restraint in atrocity situations	Not addressed	Around 27 small and mid-sized states, led by Liechtenstein and Switzerland
The permanent five	No agreed position	France and the UK back the G4; the US backs two African seats without the veto; China and Russia resist	No extension, no restriction, no abolition	Low twenties at most	—

Veto reform as a separate strand

Veto reform is often treated as part of membership reform. It is a distinct question with a distinct politics: membership reform asks the permanent five to admit others to their privilege, while veto reform asks them to give the privilege up. The second is harder, and it is also the one on which the only real progress has been made.

The case for the veto, stated fairly

• The veto is not simply an anomaly, and the arguments for it are the arguments for the Council’s design.
  • Enforcement against a permanent member would destroy the organisation rather than restrain the member. The unanimity rule keeps the great powers inside an institution they could otherwise ignore.
  • The privilege was conceived as the counterpart of a responsibility — those expected to underwrite enforcement were assured they would not be committed to it against their will.
  • As Gareth Evans has argued, the rule also protects the organisation from promising what great-power opposition would prevent it delivering, so its authority is not spent on undertakings it cannot keep.
• The reply is that the justification has outrun the practice. A single state can block a majority; permanent members veto resolutions criticising their own conduct, as Russia did over Crimea in 2014; the power shields allies and stalls peace operations; and its holders no longer match the distribution of capability the argument assumes.

The menu of proposals

Proposal	What it would do	Charter amendment needed	Where it stands
Abolition	Remove the unanimity rule from Article 27(3) entirely	Yes	Supported by much of the membership; opposed by all five
Restriction to Chapter VII	Confine the veto to enforcement decisions, removing it from procedural, quasi-judicial and appointment matters	Yes	Recurrent in the negotiations; no permanent member supports it
Two concurring vetoes	Require two or more permanent members to object before a draft falls	Yes	Reduces the power of any single member without abolishing the institution
Assembly override	Allow the General Assembly to override a veto by a special majority	Yes	Long advocated by India and others, and by Hardeep Puri in Perilous Interventions; the boldest structural proposal on the table
Extension to new permanent members	Give any new permanent members the same power	Yes	The African and, in principle, the G4 position
Withholding from new members	Create permanent seats without the veto	Yes	The US and much of the West; rejected by Africa
Voluntary restraint	Undertake not to use the veto in mass-atrocity situations	No	France–Mexico initiative; ACT Code of Conduct
Mandatory explanation	Require a public accounting to the Assembly after every veto	No	Adopted as resolution 76/262 in 2022

• The categories cluster deadlocks on two positions that are each internally coherent.
  • The equality argument: any new permanent member without the veto is a second-class permanent member, so extension is the only non-discriminatory outcome. This is Africa’s position, and India’s in principle.
  • The “no new privileges” argument: the veto is the institution’s central defect, so multiplying it would make the Council less capable, not more legitimate. This is the position of the United States, of Uniting for Consensus, and of most of the small states.
• Neither side can concede without abandoning its own case for reform, which is why the veto cluster has never moved and why the interlinkage rule freezes the other four clusters with it.

What has actually been achieved

• The France–Mexico initiative, launched in 2015, proposes a voluntary and collective undertaking by the permanent members not to use the veto where mass atrocities have been credibly established, with the Secretary-General’s determination as the trigger.
  • It has 107 supporters and no permanent member other than France. Its significance is that one permanent member has publicly accepted a limit on its own most valued privilege.
• The ACT Code of Conduct, launched in 2015, commits its signatories to support timely and decisive Council action against genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, and not to vote against credible draft resolutions to that end.
  • It has 130 member states plus the Holy See and the State of Palestine — a clear majority of the membership. France and the United Kingdom have signed; China, Russia and the United States have not.
  • It binds elected members as well as permanent ones, which is its quiet innovation: it reframes obstruction as something any Council member can be judged for.
• General Assembly resolution 76/262 of 26 April 2022, the “veto initiative”, is the most consequential change of the last two decades and required no amendment at all.
  • It obliges the President of the General Assembly to convene a formal Assembly meeting within ten working days of any veto cast in the Council, at which the casting state is invited to speak first.
  • It cannot reverse a veto and creates no legal obligation. What it creates is a procedural certainty of exposure: the vetoing state must appear before the whole membership and account for itself, and the debate is on the record.
  • The cost is real but modest. Vetoes have not become rarer since 2022 — 2024 saw the highest annual count since 1986. What has changed is that each veto now generates a documented Assembly reckoning, which strengthens the Assembly’s standing and supplies the reform debate with fresh evidence at regular intervals.

The self-entrenchment problem

• Articles 108 and 109 give each permanent member a veto over any amendment to the veto. This is not one obstacle among many; it is the structural fact from which every other obstacle follows.
  • Article 108 requires that amendments be adopted by two-thirds of the Assembly and ratified by two-thirds of members including all the permanent members.
  • Article 109(2) applies the same requirement to any amendment recommended by a general review conference, so the review route offers no way round.
• The consequence is a closed circle: the power reform exists to constrain is the power that must consent to its own constraint. No domestic constitutional order would give the beneficiary of a privilege a personal veto over its removal; the Charter does exactly that.
• Everything achievable lies outside the amendment route — voluntary undertakings, Assembly procedure, Council working methods, and interpretation. That is not a rhetorical point but the practical map of what reform can currently be.

The only reforms that have succeeded are the ones that never needed a ratification, because ratification is where the permanent members’ consent becomes decisive.

The impediments, in order of weight

The obstacles are usually listed. They are better ranked, because they are not of equal force and the weaker ones would dissolve if the stronger ones did.

First: the Article 108 double lock

• Two separate super-majorities are required, and the second contains an individual veto for each permanent member. Adoption needs two-thirds of the Assembly — at least 129 of 193. Entry into force needs ratification by two-thirds of the membership including all five permanent members.
• Ratification runs through each state’s own constitutional process. In the United States that means a treaty approved by two-thirds of the Senate, a threshold no controversial multilateral instrument has cleared in decades. An American administration could support enlargement diplomatically and still be unable to deliver it.
• The 1998 decision compounds the lock: resolution 53/30 requires the affirmative vote of two-thirds of the membership, not of those present and voting, so abstentions and absences count as opposition.
• The enemy-state clauses show how tightly the Charter is sealed.
  • Articles 53, 77 and 107 still refer to the former enemy states of the Second World War; the Assembly resolved in 1995 to initiate their deletion as obsolete, and they remain.
  • If a provision every member agrees is dead cannot be removed, the barrier to removing one the powerful want kept is not drafting. Part of the reason is that opening the Charter for one amendment invites demands for others.

Second: the permanent members’ own interest

• No permanent member has an interest in dilution, and the two with the weakest objective claim have the most to lose. Britain and France are the most exposed by any criteria-based enlargement — and correspondingly the most supportive in public and the least specific about what they would accept.
• China’s opposition is the most consequential because it is directed at named states rather than at reform in the abstract, and because Chinese ratification is indispensable.
• Russia’s position has hardened as its diplomatic isolation has grown; Andrey Kolosovskiy notes that relative decline makes a state more rather than less protective of a formal privilege, since the privilege is what remains when material power recedes.
• The United States supports enlargement while opposing the terms on which it could pass — permanent seats without the veto, which the principal claimants have already declared unacceptable.

Third: the aspirants’ regional rivals

• Every serious claimant has a determined regional objector, and each objector has enough friends to deny a two-thirds majority.
  • Pakistan against India, the most sustained and best organised of the four.
  • Italy and Spain against Germany, on the argument that a third Western European permanent seat is indefensible.
  • Argentina and Mexico against Brazil, denying that any single state can speak for Latin America.
  • China and South Korea against Japan, on grounds that are historical as much as strategic.
• These states cannot create a Council but they can prevent one, and blocking requires only sixty-five votes.

Fourth: no agreed formula

• Categories, numbers, the veto, regional selection and review clauses are all unsettled, and the interlinkage rule makes each hostage to the rest. Convergence on size is worth little while categories remain open, because the size depends on the categories.
• Two structural proposals have never gained traction, for the same reason.
  • Merging the European seats into a single European Union seat held in rotation would free a seat for another region; neither Britain nor France has accepted it.
  • The Noble World Foundation would go further and shift membership and the veto from states to sovereignty-pooling organisations altogether.
  • Both ask incumbents to surrender national seats, which is why neither is negotiable.
• The regional-representation cluster hides a further problem: whether a seat belongs to a state or a region, and if to a region, who selects, instructs and removes. The co-chairs’ “fixed regional seats” concept attempts an answer, and its mixed reception shows how unresolved this is.

Fifth: Africa’s internal contest and the veto demand

• Africa holds the strongest claim and has not converted it into an operative proposal, because the Union has never named the two states and because the veto condition is unacceptable to the states whose ratification is required.
• The Pact has strengthened the claim without resolving either difficulty. Priority for Africa is now agreed language; the terms of that priority are not.

Sixth: the quarrel about procedure

• Uniting for Consensus insists any enlargement be adopted by consensus; the G4 reads the Charter as requiring only the stated majorities. The Charter’s text is on the G4’s side; the practice of the reform process, which has proceeded by consensus since 1993, is on the other.
• This is not a technicality but a veto over the process itself. A consensus requirement gives every state a blocking vote on a question the Charter decides by two-thirds — which is why the G4 will not accept it and Uniting for Consensus will not give it up.

Seventh: fatigue and the absence of a forcing event

• Thirty-three years of consideration and seventeen of negotiation have produced no deadline and no penalty for stalling. Delay costs the permanent members nothing and costs the claimants only the frustration they have already absorbed.
• Institutions of this kind change after a shock — a war, a collapse, a founding. The Council was created when one world war’s institution failed and another war ended; the 1965 enlargement followed decolonisation. Nothing comparable has forced the question since, and today’s crisis is financial rather than constitutional, which produces retrenchment rather than redesign.

The honest counter-question

• Would an enlarged Council of twenty-five actually decide anything faster? The candid answer is probably not. More seats mean more positions to reconcile, more national statements, more penholders and longer negotiation of every text.
• Representativeness would be bought at some price in agility, and advocates rarely say what price they would accept. Novosseloff’s formulation — greater authority and legitimacy, lesser efficiency and effectiveness — is the trade-off stated honestly.
• The strongest practical conclusion is about sequencing, not principle. As Stewart Patrick notes, the reforms that have actually succeeded are those addressing working methods. Veto restraint, mandatory explanation, penholding reform and transparency deliver more and sooner without a single ratification — an argument for pursuing them alongside membership reform, not instead of it.

What the Secretary-General has actually proposed, and why it matters to developing countries

• António Guterres has not tabled a membership model, and it would be wrong to describe his position as a reform plan with numbered clauses. He has no authority to propose Charter amendments, and he has deliberately avoided naming candidate states, since doing so would forfeit the impartiality on which his advocacy depends.
• What he has done is reframe the question, in three moves that matter more to the developing world than any seat allocation.
  • He has made Africa’s exclusion the first-order injustice. Addressing the Council in August 2024, he said the world’s foremost peace and security body cannot lack a permanent voice for a continent of well over a billion people, and that in 1945 most African states were colonies with no say in the arrangement made about them.
  • He has linked Council reform to the international financial architecture, treating the two as halves of one redistribution of power rather than as separate agendas.
  • He has insisted the alternative to reform is irrelevance, arguing that institutions that do not reflect the world as it is will be worked around rather than repaired.

“It’s time to reform both the Security Council and the Bretton Woods institutions. This is essentially a question of redistributing power in line with the realities of today’s world.” — António Guterres

• The linkage is the substantive claim for developing countries. A permanent seat changes who decides sanctions and mandates; quota and voting reform at the Fund and the Bank changes who decides the terms of development finance. The same 1945 settlement produced both, and reforming one without the other leaves the distribution of power intact.
• Our Common Agenda (September 2021) set the frame and led to the Summit of the Future and the Pact for the Future (2024), which carried the Africa language into agreed text.
• A New Agenda for Peace (July 2023) is the closest he has come to specifics: a Council more representative of today’s geopolitical realities, urgent progress in the negotiations, procedures democratised through burden-sharing on drafting, and greater accountability for the use of the veto. It proposes no membership model.
• For developing countries the value of this is leverage rather than delivery. He cannot amend the Charter; but making African representation the organising priority has made any model that leaves Africa out harder to advance, and tying the Council to the financial institutions gives the Global South one argument spanning both.

India’s case: the sharpest test of every argument above

• India’s claim satisfies almost every criterion any bloc has proposed, and still has not moved.
  • Founding member: India signed the Declaration by United Nations on 1 January 1942 and participated at San Francisco in 1945, while still a British dependency.
  • Population and economy: nearly a fifth of humanity, among the world’s largest economies by nominal output and third by purchasing power parity.
  • Military capacity: among the top five military spenders and the largest standing armies; a nuclear-weapon state outside the Treaty regime.
  • Operational contribution: the largest cumulative contributor of peacekeepers in the organisation’s history, with more fatalities than any other member state; the first to deploy an all-women formed police unit, in Liberia in 2007, and the first contributor to the Trust Fund on sexual exploitation and abuse in 2016.
  • Council experience: eight terms as an elected member, the most recent in 2021–22, and a declared candidature for 2028–29.
• The stories of a seat offered in the 1950s should be stated as the record supports them and no further. The documentary basis is correspondence between Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit and Jawaharlal Nehru on a 1950 American suggestion that India take the Chinese seat, and a 1955 Soviet approach recorded in Nehru’s papers.
  • What was raised in 1950 was not a sixth seat but India replacing China, which Nehru refused as an affront to Beijing and a wound to Sino-Indian relations.
  • A. G. Noorani characterised the Soviet approach of 1955 as a feeler rather than a firm offer. No formal offer of permanent membership has ever been documented, and treating these approaches as a squandered entitlement overstates what the record shows.

“India, because of many factors, is certainly entitled to a permanent seat in the Security Council. But we are not going in at the cost of China.” — Jawaharlal Nehru

• The declared P5 positions are asymmetric. The United States, the United Kingdom, France and Russia have all expressed support for Indian permanent membership in some form, with the United States explicitly opposing the extension of the veto. China has never endorsed it, confining itself to support for greater developing-country representation.
• China is the standing obstacle; Pakistan is the standing complication. China’s ratification is indispensable and has never been offered; Pakistan’s role in Uniting for Consensus ensures a permanent, organised bloc arguing India’s case down in the Assembly, where the two-thirds must be found.
• India’s own formulation is “reformed multilateralism” — not abandoning the institutions of 1945 but making them representative, an argument aimed at the whole Global South rather than at India’s seat alone.

“Only reformed multilateralism with a reformed United Nations at its centre can meet the aspirations of humanity.” — Narendra Modi

• The counter-arguments deserve to be stated at their strongest.
  • A permanent seat without the veto may be worth less than it costs. It confers standing and permanent presence but no capacity to block, which is the only power the incumbents actually value.
  • India’s leverage may be greater as leader of the unrepresented than as a junior permanent member. Its convening power in the G-77, the Non-Aligned Movement, L.69 and the expanded BRICS rests on not being inside the inner circle.
  • Mukherjee and Malone identify three weaknesses in the pursuit itself: limited resources for multilateral diplomacy, insufficient engagement with the normative questions before the Council, and an over-reliance on entitlement as the basis of the claim.
  • Jaishankar’s framing shifts the ground from entitlement to obsolescence — that the era in which a few nations set the agenda is over, and that the institution’s failure to reflect that is the institution’s problem rather than India’s.
• India’s UN diplomacy in the round — the Assembly and the G-77, peacekeeping, its Council terms, its position across the five clusters — belongs with the fuller treatment of India and the UN system. What matters here is that its claim is the cleanest test of whether the reform criteria mean anything.

Assessment

• Reform would require one of three things, none in prospect: a permanent member concluding that blockage costs more than the privilege is worth; a coalition assembling not merely a two-thirds majority but one the permanent members would ratify; or a shock large enough to make the present arrangement untenable to its beneficiaries.
• The working-methods track is the only one moving, because it is the only one needing no ratification. Resolution 76/262, the ACT Code of Conduct and the France–Mexico undertaking are modest, and they are also the entirety of what three decades have delivered.
• The last two years have produced the strongest agreed language and the clearest map of disagreement in the history of the process — the Pact’s Africa commitment, a convergent seat range of 21 to 27, universal acceptance of elected-category expansion — and still no text.
• The deadlock is not a failure of diplomacy but a feature of the design. The Charter gave the permanent members a veto over the removal of their veto, and every subsequent difficulty is downstream of that choice.
• The cost of continued failure falls on the institution, not on the claimants. As Sushma Swaraj told the Assembly, a United Nations unwilling to accept reform erodes its own legitimacy and risks the fate of the League — an argument aimed at the incumbents, since it is their institution that loses.

Everyone agrees the structure is flawed; no one agrees on the fix; and the people whose consent is indispensable are precisely the people who would lose.