Transparency at the UN Security Council remains shrouded in secrecy

Twice this summer, the 15 members of the Security Council marked ballot papers with the names of candidates for Secretary-General, and twice a teller drawn from their own number fed the papers into a shredder. At the second poll, on August 21, Carolyn Rodrigues Birkett of Guyana came out ahead, with eight encouragements against three discouragements, short of the nine a decision requires. We know this because it leaked, as these results always do. Officially, nothing occurred. In later rounds, the Council moves to coloured ballots so that a veto can be distinguished from an ordinary discouragement, which indicates the arrangement the rest of the time.

Two days earlier, at the annual debate the Council holds on its own working methods, the head of the Security Council Report, the independent body that keeps the institutional memory the Council does not keep, told members there was a case for asking whether official disclosure would produce a reliable public record. That an outside monitor must make that request, at a meeting convened to examine the Council’s transparency, is the shortest description of the problem.

The habit extends past the succession. The chairmanships of the Council’s subsidiary bodies have gone unallocated all year. These include the committee deciding terrorist listings. China and Russia maintain that the Iran sanctions expired in October 2025 and will not have that committee in the package. The Western permanent members insist the snapback held and refuse to set it aside. The chairmanships are negotiated as one package bargain, so all wait upon one. The elected ten appealed in May and wrote formally on July 30, and France has called the deadlock unacceptable. It is the longest such gap since these allocations began to be recorded in 1979.

The cost does not fall only on files that interest us. Sanctions committees are not working at full capacity, and the working group on children and armed conflict, having managed conclusions on one 2025 report and carrying seven more, is an accountability mechanism quietly going dark. The monitoring team’s report on terrorism reached the Council in February through a monthly president standing in for a chair that does not exist. No rule was broken, for the sufficient reason that there is no rule. Note 507, revised in December 2024, asks only that consultations on chairmanships be balanced, transparent and inclusive. On whether a state with an interest in a file ought to chair the committee handling it, there is silence. The single safeguard is an unwritten understanding that permanent members do not take the gavel, and since they approve the package anyway, they choose the chairs without the inconvenience of holding one.

The listings operate on the same principle, though here I part company with much of the commentary. A great deal has been written about which government blocked which name, and that record is not in dispute. The more useful observation is that nobody can count them. The monthly list of holds circulates within the committee and is never published, so the only tally in existence is assembled from the briefings of governments that publicise their own defeats. We know our share, not the total, and nor does anyone outside that room. A procedure that cannot be counted cannot be argued about, which is much of its attraction to those who employ it. Money follows the same instinct. Article 19 removes a state’s Assembly vote when arrears reach two years of assessment, but the test is a ratio, so it bites the small and spares the large. Six states lost their vote this session; the United States, which owes some 4.5 billion dollars, did not.

Then there is the pen. In 2011, at one of these same debates, Hardeep Singh Puri asked from our chair why drafting Council texts should be a monopoly of the permanent members. He is credited with introducing the word “penholder” into the Council’s vocabulary, a measure of how informal the practice was and remains. It has no basis in the Charter and none in the rules of procedure, which, after eighty years, are still described as provisional. Fifteen years on, the arrangement has hardened. Roughly four elected members hold a pen at all, and China holds precisely one file, Afghanistan. The pen settles the wording and the calendar: who is consulted, when a meeting is convened, who speaks first, and when the Council returns to a subject. The last is the most valuable power in the building and the least noticed.

Amendment offers no relief. Article 108 requires ratification by two-thirds of the membership, including all five permanent members, and a permanent member need never veto it; it declines to ratify, indefinitely and at no cost. Four amendments have been adopted, none since 1971. On July 29, the Assembly rolled the reform negotiations into an eighteenth year, India joining consensus while asking how long the world must wait.

We launched our campaign for the elected seat of 2028 and 2029 in July. It will be fought, as such campaigns are, on the proposition that the Council is unrepresentative, which is true and has convinced nobody who counts. There is a smaller proposition available, and it can be carried because the remedies are on the table already and none can be vetoed. Uncontested chairmanships should be settled separately from disputed ones, and chairs should serve two years, with vice-chairs providing continuity, so one quarrel cannot freeze the machinery. The member placing a hold should be named and the annual count published. The straw poll figures that leak anyway should be released by the Council. A body deciding on terrorist listings, on money and on its own leadership ought to be capable of saying who decided what, and when.

Views expressed are personal