Reform of the United Nations Security Council

Selman OZDAN

INTRODUCTION

The UN Security Council is the crucial institution in the United Nations, because it has responsibility to provide international security and peace. Moreover, the Security Council has a power to enforce armed forces in order to prevent international conflicts. Recently, the Security Council has faced serious problems and it has been forced to make reform in the structure of Security Council. This paper analyzes the reform proposals for UN Security Council.

The first part of this paper gives a background of the United Nations Security Council. In the part II, this paper shows the UN Security Council’s functions and powers in the international arena. In the third part, this paper examines the efficiency of Security Council by giving recent examples. In part IV, it is explained why there must be a reform in the Security Council. In the fifth section, the Security Council’s reform plans are discussed. Section six propounds some perspectives of current and potential permanent members about the Security Council reforms. Finally, section seven concludes this paper by analyzing the current and proposed situation of Security Council.

I- THE BACKGROUND & STRUCTURE OF UN SECURITY COUNCIL

UN Security Council was established in 1946. During the Cold War, the world was separated into two polar opposites: The United States and Soviet Union. It was inevitable that many of the permanent Security Council member states were polarized. This situation disrupted the functions of UN Security Council. But, the intervention of UN members to South Korea in 1950 is an important fact to understand UN Security Council’s power and in this case the Soviet Union was not presented at the vote.¹