The number being reported is thirteen, and it is the least informative figure in the story.
On 11 March the United Nations Security Council adopted a resolution condemning Iran’s attacks. Thirteen members voted in favor. None voted against. Russia and China abstained.
Thirteen out of fifteen reads as near unanimity, and a great deal of the coverage has treated it that way. It is not what happened. The two abstentions are the entire content of the vote, and understanding why requires knowing how this body actually works, which most people reasonably do not.
What the Council is
Fifteen members. Five are permanent and never change: the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia and China. The other ten are elected by the General Assembly for two year terms, on a rotation designed to spread membership around the regions, and they have exactly the same vote as the permanent five on any substantive question.
Adopting a substantive resolution requires nine affirmative votes out of fifteen. That is the first threshold and it is easily met most of the time.
The second threshold is the one everybody has heard of and most people misunderstand.
The veto, and the thing that is not a veto
The Charter says a substantive decision requires nine affirmative votes including the concurring votes of the permanent members. Read literally, that means all five permanent members must vote yes, and an abstention would sink a resolution as surely as a no.
That is not how it has ever worked. From the Council’s earliest years, permanent members abstained and resolutions were adopted anyway, and the practice hardened into law. The International Court of Justice confirmed it in 1971: a voluntary abstention by a permanent member does not prevent adoption.
So the veto is an active thing. A permanent member must vote no. Abstention is the deliberate decision not to use it.
Which makes an abstention by Russia or China a considered act with a precise meaning: we are not prepared to endorse this, and we are not prepared to stop it. Two governments that could have killed this resolution on their own, separately, chose not to.
What the resolution can and cannot do
The next thing worth knowing is that Council resolutions are not one kind of object.
Under Chapter VI the Council recommends: it calls on parties, urges, deplores, condemns. Those resolutions carry the authority of the body and no enforcement mechanism.
Under Chapter VII the Council determines that a situation threatens international peace and security, and may then impose measures that bind all member states: sanctions, embargoes, and in the strongest form the authorization of force.
The distinction is visible in the drafting. A resolution that condemns is doing the first thing. A resolution that decides, and invokes Chapter VII, is doing the second. This week’s is a condemnation, which means its practical effect is a statement of position by the most authoritative body in the system and nothing further.
That is not nothing. It shapes what other states can say and do, it is cited in courts and in subsequent negotiations, and it makes some later steps easier. It is also, on its own, a piece of paper.
Why it is drafted that way
Because a stronger text would have been vetoed, and everybody in the room knew it before the drafting began.
This is the part of Council practice that is invisible from outside. The public vote is the last step of a private negotiation in which draft language is circulated among the permanent members and adjusted until it can survive. A resolution that reaches a vote has usually already been through several versions, each weakened at the point where somebody indicated they would not let it through.
So thirteen votes and two abstentions does not describe a body that overwhelmingly agreed. It describes a text negotiated down to the level at which two governments were willing to step aside, and then passed.
What happens when it is blocked
One more piece of machinery, because it is the thing people reach for when the Council cannot act and it is less powerful than its name suggests.
In 1950, with the Council deadlocked over Korea, the General Assembly adopted a procedure now known as Uniting for Peace. Where the Council fails to exercise its responsibility because of a lack of unanimity among the permanent members, the Assembly may take up the matter and make recommendations, including on the use of force.
It has been invoked a number of times since, and its legal standing has been argued about ever since, on the reasonable ground that the Charter gives the Council primary responsibility and the Assembly cannot simply vote itself a power the Charter placed elsewhere.
What is not in dispute is the practical position. An Assembly resolution under this procedure recommends. It does not bind member states, it does not authorize anything in the way a Chapter VII decision does, and no state is obliged to act on it. Its value is that it produces a number: a count of how many of the world’s governments are prepared to say something out loud, unfiltered by five vetoes.
What to watch next
Three markers, and they are the ones that distinguish a Council that is functioning from one that is issuing statements.
The first is whether any subsequent draft invokes Chapter VII. That is the line between condemning and deciding, and crossing it requires the same two governments to abstain again on a text that actually binds. Abstaining on a condemnation is cheap. Abstaining on enforcement is not, and nobody should assume the first predicts the second.
The second is what happens in the General Assembly, which has no veto and where a large majority can pass a resolution that carries moral weight without binding anyone. When the Council is blocked, that is where the argument moves, and the size of the majority there is the better measure of where states actually stand.
The third is the regional track, which may matter more than either. Foreign ministers from twelve regional states met in Riyadh last week. A settlement to a war in the Gulf is considerably more likely to be assembled by the governments that share the water than by fifteen states in New York, and the Council’s role in that case would be to ratify an agreement reached elsewhere rather than to produce one.
Which is, historically, what the Council has mostly done when it has done anything. The resolutions that ended conflicts were nearly always the recording of a deal, not the making of one.
