Eighty years after its creation, the United Nations finds itself constrained by the very arrangements designed to preserve it.
In three essays published by the Indian Council of World Affairs in a paper titled The United Nations@80 Way To Larger Freedom, Ambassador Asoke Mukerji demonstrates how the UN has been held hostage by the veto power of the five permanent members of the Security Council, while its most representative organ, the General Assembly, has been systematically weakened.
The UN Charter itself anticipated the need for reform, notes Mukherji, who served as the Permanent Representative of India to UN in New York from 2013 to 2015. Article 109 provided for a review conference, to be convened within ten years of 1945. By 1955, the General Assembly even adopted Resolution 992, affirming that the review would take place at an “appropriate time.” That time has never come. Not once in 80 years has the review mechanism been activated.
The reasons are clear. Articles 24, 25 and 27 gave the Security Council “primary responsibility” for international peace and security, made its decisions binding, and required the “concurring votes” of the P5. This gave the five permanent members a veto, and with it, the ability to block Charter reform. The General Assembly, by contrast, was limited to recommendations, explicitly barred under Article 12 from intervening in issues on the Council’s agenda unless invited to do so.
The result has been a paralysis that has crippled the UN’s central mission. The Council has failed to prevent or resolve crises from Ukraine to West Asia to Afghanistan, even when it has adopted unanimous resolutions. Its inability to enforce its own decisions has opened the way for unilateral sanctions and military actions outside the UN framework, undermining the interests of developing countries that depend on multilateralism.
Mukerji recalls that despite restrictions, the General Assembly has been the driver of much of the UN’s progress. It was in the Assembly that the Genocide Convention, the outlawing of racial discrimination, and gender equality in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were advanced—often with decisive contributions from India. The Assembly also created the UN Development Programme, negotiated the 1986 Declaration on the Right to Development, and adopted Agenda 2030 with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
Yet the Assembly’s authority remains non-binding. Its democratic one-country-one-vote structure has delivered results, but without enforcement power. The great powers, through the Council, have reserved that for themselves. This deliberate imbalance is the “anomaly within the Charter” that Mukerji identifies as the central flaw in the UN system.
Mukerji’s account of the Charter’s negotiating history shows that the veto was contested from the very beginning. Australia, backed by New Zealand, argued forcefully that the veto would block conciliation diplomacy and even prevent amendments to the Charter. India supported that logic but noted the “unanimous position of the great powers” at Yalta to impose safeguards in their own interest. Smaller states were told that rejecting the veto meant rejecting the UN itself.
The consequence is that the veto, inserted at the insistence of the P5, continues to obstruct reform. Despite amendments that expanded the elected membership of the Security Council and ECOSOC in the 1960s and 1970s, no P5 power has ever allowed discussion on removing or diluting its privileged position. Even in the run-up to the 2024 UN Summit of the Future, the P5 blocked any reference to Charter review, fearing a challenge to the veto.
The essays also highlight the practical cost of this structural imbalance. The Security Council has been unable to prevent a growing number of crises worldwide, affecting billions of people. Political settlements once supported by UN peacekeeping have dwindled. Missions in Africa have been wound up under pressure from host governments, often amid rising instability and terrorism.
Meanwhile, the General Assembly’s role in championing development is undermined by the lack of resources and by geopolitical rivalry. The 2024 Pact for the Future, instead of strengthening the Charter framework, avoided reform of the Security Council altogether, strayed into non-UN treaty frameworks like the IMF and WTO, and was later disavowed by major powers.
This stands in stark contrast to the Charter’s broader vision of “larger freedom”. As Mukerji notes, the UN’s social and developmental work—decolonisation, gender equality, the right to development, sustainable development—has been as important as peace and security. Yet without institutional balance, those gains remain fragile.
Mukerji’s prescription is unambiguous. The UN must activate Article 109 and convene a Charter Review Conference. The process is complex—requiring two-thirds support in the General Assembly, nine votes in the Security Council without a veto, and subsequent ratification including by the P5—but it is written into the Charter. To ignore it is to let the institution wither.
He dismisses proposals for “non-amendment” reform through evolving interpretations as inadequate. Without harmonising the decision-making of the Council and the Assembly through a formal review, the UN will remain fractured, to the detriment of most of its members—particularly the Global South, which has consistently pressed for reformed multilateralism.
At 80, the United Nations is trapped by the very safeguard its great-power founders imposed in 1945. The veto, designed to preserve P5 unity, has instead paralysed collective security and blocked reform. The General Assembly, despite its achievements, remains sidelined. The Charter’s review clause, the only built-in path to reform, lies unused.
Ambassador Asoke Mukerji’s essays– The Case for Reviewing the UN Charter, Empowering the UN General Assembly, and The United Nations and “The Unity of Mankind”—strip away illusions: the UN’s crisis is not accidental but structural, rooted in choices made at its birth and never revisited.
The remedy is also in the Charter itself. To ignore it further would be to consign the UN to irrelevance, just when the world most needs a functioning, equitable multilateral system.
In a career spanning three decades and counting, Ramananda (Ram to his friends) has been the foreign editor of The Telegraph, Outlook Magazine and the New Indian Express. He helped set up rediff.com’s editorial operations in San Jose and New York, helmed sify.com, and was the founder editor of India.com.
His work has featured in national and international publications like the Al Jazeera Centre for Studies, Global Times and Ashahi Shimbun. But his one constant over all these years, he says, has been the attempt to understand rising India’s place in the world.
He can rustle up a mean salad, his oil-less pepper chicken is to die for, and all it takes is some beer and rhythm and blues to rock his soul.
Talk to him about foreign and strategic affairs, media, South Asia, China, and of course India.
