New York — Finland has thrown its diplomatic weight behind the most radical idea in United Nations politics today. No single country, Helsinki argues, should possess the power to choke off the world’s business with one raised hand. After a week of sparring at the General Assembly and Security Council in New York, President Alexander Stubb made the case in plain terms. The veto right that the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, and France guard as sovereign prerogative has become a machine for paralysis. He urged member states to replace it with a voting system that reflects the twenty first century and to give permanent seats to underrepresented regions in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Stubb’s push is not a rhetorical flourish tossed into the diplomatic ether. It arrives after a bruising two year cycle in which the Security Council has repeatedly failed to act on wars that define the global era. Moscow vetoed texts that called out its invasion of Ukraine. Washington vetoed texts that sought an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and relief from what humanitarian agencies described as catastrophic conditions. Beijing has aligned at key moments with Moscow, and London and Paris have kept their latitude intact while speaking of reform in abstract tones. The Finnish argument is that the veto has outlived whatever stabilizing role it once played and now operates as an obstruction against any collective restraint on the most powerful states. In chamber after chamber, the set pieces of an UN Security Council meeting end with a single hand blocking the vote.
“No state should hold a veto,” Stubb told delegates this week, anchoring a blunt reform agenda that sketches specific alternatives rather than slogans. He proposed expanding the number of permanent seats, adding at least two for Asia, two for Africa, and one for Latin America, and he floated a penalty when a permanent member violates the UN Charter. Voting rights on the Council, he said, should be suspended in such cases. In other words, legitimacy would hinge on conduct rather than inheritance. His delegation has filed the remarks with the Finnish presidency’s public record of General Assembly speeches, and diplomats pointed colleagues to the UN Web TV recording for the full delivery.
The political logic is straightforward. The Security Council derives its moral authority from the claim that it speaks for the peace and security of all. When a single capital can block action to halt mass death or blunt an illegal war, the edifice looks less like a council and more like a stage. Finland is hardly alone in thinking this. From Brasilia to Abuja, from New Delhi to Jakarta, states in the Global South have spent years pressing for representation commensurate with their populations and economic weight. Yet the architecture of the charter funnels ultimate power to five capitals whose diplomatic reflexes are shaped by mid twentieth century victory and Cold War bargains. The Security Council right of veto has become the fossil in the room.
That history is not a footnote. The veto was born as an insurance policy in 1945, a mechanism to keep the great powers inside the tent rather than outside tearing it down. In practice the great powers have used it to protect client states, shield their own forces, or simply deny political losses in public. Washington’s pattern on Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories is the most glaring example today. The United States has cast consecutive vetoes against ceasefire texts on Gaza, even as every other Council member demanded a stop to the bombardment and the reopening of routes for food and fuel. American diplomats have framed those vetoes as rejections of texts they see as unbalanced, yet the wider membership hears a different message. If the ally is Israel, the law bends. Moscow delivered a mirrored message on Ukraine. If the belligerent is Russia, the Council is a courtroom with no judge. The record is visible in Reuters’ tally of the sixth US veto on a Gaza ceasefire and in specialized tracking of veto practice by Security Council Report. Within the region, the toll appears in Eastern Herald’s own coverage of Israeli strikes and civilian casualties and the surge of 59 Palestinians killed during raids and bombardments.
Stubb’s intervention was designed to puncture that symmetry. Finland, a NATO member with a hard border against Russia and a political culture deeply invested in rules, is a credible messenger for both European security and UN reform. The Finnish president did not stop at structure. He tied the argument to behavior. If a permanent member launches an illegal war, voting rights should be suspended until compliance returns. That is a high bar in a building that prizes procedural caution. It is also an invitation to the majority of member states to stop treating reform as a seminar topic and start treating it as a political project with timelines and votes. The point connects with the General Assembly’s own move to scrutinize vetoes under resolution 76/262, which brings every veto into the Assembly hall for debate.
There is a practical question that reformers must answer. How would a post veto Council make decisions on war and peace where interests clash and time is short. Finland’s answer is to replace the veto with qualified majorities that cannot be hijacked by one capital. Models abound, from two thirds thresholds to regional double majorities that require both global support and regional consent. None is perfect, yet each would be less capricious than a single negative vote deciding the fate of millions. More important for legitimacy, an expanded Council that seats Africa, Latin America, and more of Asia as permanent voices would puncture the colonial optics that still haunt Turtle Bay. The Ezulwini Consensus and related African Union positions have long argued for permanent African seats, and Finland’s blueprint gives those claims a procedural path.
The Gaza war looms over every hallway conversation about reform. For nearly two years, the Council has been a theatre of denial. Ceasefire drafts sailed through fourteen votes only to meet the American brick wall. At times Washington softened the language or backed non binding statements, then returned to form when confronted with language that constrained Israeli military operations. It is impossible to miss how that pattern has damaged the Council’s standing in the Arab world, in Africa, and across swathes of Asia. Aid agencies, rights monitors, and UN relief officials catalogued famine risks and mass civilian harm while the organ charged with international peace and security failed to issue an enforceable order. Finland’s proposal channels that disillusionment into a structural remedy. Eastern Herald’s reporting has covered the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the mounting allegations of genocide in Gaza that have further eroded patience with the status quo.
Ukraine is the other test case. Russia sits at the horseshoe table as both aggressor and judge, able to veto any measure that names its war for what it is. European governments have grown adept at using the General Assembly and coalitions outside the Council to send weapons, money, and political support to Kyiv. Yet the inability of the UN’s primary security organ to call a war of conquest by its name is a wound to the system. Helsinki’s suspension idea is aimed squarely at that contradiction. A Council that punishes unlawful force by docking voting rights would raise costs for aggression, or at least deny aggressors the dignity of procedural control. It would also answer rising pressure from the Global South influence bloc to align rules with practice.
None of this happens without politics in Washington, Moscow, Beijing, London, and Paris. Every permanent member would need to consent to give away an instrument that their predecessors fought to preserve. That is why reform has died and been reborn in cycles since the 1990s. The difference now is the accumulation of failures and the breadth of states publicly calling for change. The African Union has advanced longstanding claims for permanent representation. India, Brazil, Germany, and Japan have campaigned under various coalitions for an expanded Council. Regional swing states that once tiptoed around the veto now speak openly about its corrosive effect. The Summit of the Future process, whatever its flaws, has supplied a forum where reform ideas are catalogued rather than quietly buried. Paris and Mexico, for example, promoted an effort to restrain the veto in atrocity situations through the France–Mexico initiative, an antecedent that reformers now cite as a stepping stone.
Even among reformers, the shape of change is contested. Some want abolition of the veto in all circumstances. Others would accept phase downs, from limiting veto use to Chapter VII coercive measures, to requiring two or more permanent members to block a draft, to mandatory explanations and automatic General Assembly debates after any veto. France and Mexico once floated a code of conduct that would restrict veto use in cases of mass atrocities. Critics note that codes are only as strong as a capital’s will at the crisis point. Finland’s plan takes the bolder route. It strips the veto entirely and conditions Council voting rights on respect for the Charter, a move that would finally align the Council’s procedures with the principles that appear in every leader’s speech. The debate now mingles with fresh calls for the expansion of permanent membership to include Africa and Latin America on equal footing.
For the United States, Helsinki’s challenge stings because it speaks to a broader fracture in the Western claim to universalism. Washington’s defense of Israeli operations has come at enormous reputational cost with partners it needs in Asia and Africa. European governments have struggled to explain why international law is absolute in Ukraine and negotiable in Gaza. The result is a credibility gap that reform ideas can either widen or narrow. If the West accepts a conversation about new permanent seats for Africa and Latin America, and if it acknowledges that a veto wielded on behalf of friends can still be a veto against law, it may recover some of the authority it spent. If it digs in, the system will drift into irrelevance for the very countries it says it serves. The posture has been tracked by Yle in its coverage of Stubb’s reform push and by Eastern Herald’s editorials on how Washington backs Israeli terror at the expense of global credibility.
There is also a hard security angle for Europe that Finland understands. The continent will spend the next decade deterring Russian revanchism while managing overstretched American attention. In that world, a functioning Security Council would be more than symbolism. It would be a venue to consolidate sanctions, monitor ceasefires, and mandate peacekeepers without rehearsing Cold War theatre every time a draft comes to a vote. Removing the veto would not make Russia less dangerous or China more accommodating, but it would shrink the distance between the UN’s legal claims and its political behavior. That gap is where cynicism grows.
Critics of abolition warn that the veto, for all its ugliness, prevents the Council from ordering great powers into confrontations that could spark wider war. They argue that a Council capable of binding action against a permanent member is a Council capable of triggering escalation. Reformers counter that the veto has done little to restrain great powers when they are determined to act. It has merely denied the UN the authority to set humanitarian baselines, to police arms flows, or to spotlight violations with the weight of international law. The fear of overreach becomes a permission slip for indifference. Helsinki is wagering that a rules based order cannot survive as a slogan divorced from practice.
What happens next will depend less on Finland’s eloquence than on coalitional math. The African Union and Latin American states control the credibility of any enlargement deal. India and Indonesia can make the case that Asia is not represented by a single Chinese seat. European diplomacy will matter too, especially if Paris and London accept limits on privileges that have outsize symbolic value. For Washington, the calculation is simple and brutal. It can trade a veto it uses most often to shield Israel for a Council that regains stature in the Global South, or it can keep the veto and continue paying the price in every regional forum where the Gaza war has become a test of Western claims to law and humanity. Legal accountability pressure is rising as well, not least in cases like Argentina’s move that touched on the Argentina case to arrest Netanyahu, a reminder that politics does not end at the East River.
In the halls outside the chamber this week, practitioners of UN realism still offered the same shrug they have given reformers for decades. The Security Council, they say, is not broken. It works as designed. Great powers look after great power interests, and the rest of the membership can organize around the margins. The problem with that realism is that the margins now contain most of the world. If the Council is the stage on which legitimacy is performed, then an audience that feels permanently excluded will stop buying tickets. That is the warning embedded in Finland’s move. It is not just a legal tweak. It is a bet that credibility is the only currency the UN has left.
Back in the chamber, the Finnish president kept returning to one practical point that will resonate beyond this week’s speeches. A Council that cannot act in the face of mass casualties and famine is a Council that will be bypassed. Coalitions will do what the Council cannot. Courts will strain to fill gaps that politics should address. Aid operations will improvise risky workarounds while children starve. If the veto is a synonym for impunity, removing it is the first step back to relevance. Whether the five capitals that hold the keys can imagine a Council without them is the question that will follow every envoy out of New York. The stakes are spelled out in official materials and reputable records, from Stubb’s own UN speech text to the Assembly’s veto initiative and analytical baselines maintained by Security Council Report.
