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"The UNSC is failing people living in conflict, with Russia and the United States particularly responsible for abusing their veto power," said Oxfam.
As the number of people in need of humanitarian assistance worldwide has skyrocketed by 150% over the last decade, five powerful countries on the United Nations Security Council have had hundreds of opportunities to vote for progress in some of the world's most protracted conflicts—but in dozens of cases, countries including the United States and Russia have instead vetoed peace and security resolutions.
In its report, Vetoing Humanity, Oxfam International pointed Thursday to numerous vetoes made by the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council (UNSC), or the P5, which the humanitarian group said have placed their own economic and political interests ahead of the council's mission.
The group examined 23 of the world's longest violent conflicts, including those in the occupied Palestinian territories, Syria, Ukraine, and Yemen, which have collectively been the subjects of 454 resolutions passed by the UNSC since 2014.
But 30 resolutions have been vetoed by one of more of the P5 countries, including eight out of 12 regarding Palestine and Israel, 15 out of 53 on Syria, and 4 out of 7 on Ukraine.
"The UNSC is failing people living in conflict, with Russia and the United States particularly responsible for abusing their veto power," said Oxfam, noting that the two countries have together cast 75% of the 88 vetoes at the UNSC since 1989, with China casting the rest.
The other two permanent members, the United Kingdom and France, have not used their veto power since 1989, but they have still joined the other powerful countries in undermining global peace and security, said Oxfam.
In addition to veto power, the P5 has "pen-holding" privileges at the UNSC, allowing them to lead negotiations and decide how resolutions are drafted or whether they are ignored.
"The erratic and self-interested behavior of UNSC members has contributed to an explosion of humanitarian needs that is now outpacing humanitarian organizations' ability to respond. This demands a fundamental change of our international security architecture at the very top."
The P5 members have "deliberately cherry-picked which conflicts to address in the Council," reads the report. "Over the last decade, over 95% of the resolutions that the UNSC passed relate to just half of the protracted crises, leaving the other half mostly neglected."
France, the U.K., and the U.S. have held the pen on two-thirds of protracted crises over the last decade, allowing them to direct negotiations. For example, the U.K. has pen-holding privileges in talks on Yemen, "where it has interests due to historical colonial links and the strategic desire to maintain maritime routes."
The United States' use of its veto power at the UNSC has come under particular scrutiny in the past year, as it has vetoed three resolutions calling for a cease-fire in Gaza since Israel began bombarding the enclave and blocking humanitarian aid to its 2.3 million people, pushing the population toward famine. It has also vetoed proposals to grant U.N. membership to Palestine, despite the U.N. General Assembly (UNGA) voting in favor, 138-9.
"While the UNGA has passed at least 77 resolutions over the last decade supporting Palestinian self-determination and human rights and an end to Israel's illegal occupation, the U.S. has used its veto power six times to block resolutions perceived as unfavorable to its ally Israel," said Oxfam. "The U.S. vetoes have created a permissive environment for Israel to expand illegal settlements in the Palestinian territory with impunity."
P5 vetoes have "more often than not," said Oxfam executive director Amitabh Behar, "contradicted the will of the U.N. General Assembly, in which all states are represented."
The report details other vetoes by the P5, including a 2023 veto by Russia of a nine-month extension of cross-border assistance to northern Syria‚ a decision that left 4.1 million people with little or no access to food, water, or medicine. Russia has also vetoed several resolutions on the country's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, despite the fact that the U.N. Charter states that "a party to a dispute shall abstain from voting."
"China, France, Russia, the U.K., and the U.S. took responsibility for global security at the UNSC in what is now a bygone colonial age," said Behar. "The contradictions of their acting as judge and jury of their own military alliances, interests, and adventures are incompatible with a world seeking peace and justice for all."
While the P5 ostensibly helped form the UNSC with the aim of promoting and maintaining global peace and security, the report notes that "they are providing more resources in the form of military aid than they are in humanitarian assistance," with its assistance being used not just defensively by recipients but also helping "to fuel and perpetuate the conflicts that the UNSC is failing to prevent and resolve."
"In 2019, the USA provided three times as much security assistance as humanitarian aid: $18.8 billion versus $6 billion," reads the report. "China pledged $20 million a year in military aid grants to Africa over 2015–17, whereas its worldwide humanitarian assistance in 2016 totaled less than $21 million."
"Not only have the P5 governments repeatedly failed to act to avert conflict, many have profited from wars by directly selling weapons to warring parties despite violations of international humanitarian law and the human suffering resulting from these wars," the report continues.
Behar said that "the erratic and self-interested behavior of UNSC members has contributed to an explosion of humanitarian needs that is now outpacing humanitarian organizations' ability to respond. This demands a fundamental change of our international security architecture at the very top."
The report comes as the U.N. prepares for the Summit of the Future, scheduled to kick off next week with the aim of envisioning "a revitalized U.N."
Oxfam made several recommendations to end the P5's ability to undermine the mission of UNSC, calling on member states to:
"We need a new vision for a U.N. system that meets its original ambitions and made fit for purpose for today's reality," Behar said. "A Council that works for the global majority, not a powerful few."
A spokesperson for Iran's Foreign Ministry called on Israel's allies to "stop supporting and arming it."
The Israeli military carried out a series of airstrikes on central Syria late Sunday, reportedly killing more than a dozen people and prompting a furious response from Syrian ally Iran.
"We strongly condemn this criminal attack," Nasser Kanaani, a spokesperson for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, said during a press conference in Tehran.
Kanaani went on to urge Israel's weapons suppliers, chiefly the United States and Germany, to "stop supporting and arming it" as its catastrophic assault on the Gaza Strip spills out across the region. Nearly 40 people were wounded in Israel's strikes on Sunday, according to a Syrian health official, and several are in critical condition.
Citing two unnamed regional intelligence sources, Reuters reported early Monday that the Israeli strikes hit a "major military research center for chemical arms production located near Misyaf."
The facility, according to Reuters, "is believed to house a team of Iranian military experts involved in weapons production."
Kanaani denied that the facility hit was connected to Iran.
"What official sources from the Syrian government have announced is that there were attacks on some Syrian facilities, including an attack on a research center affiliated with the Ministry of Defense and the Syrian army," he said.
Civilians were reportedly among those killed and wounded in Sunday's strikes, which came as the world awaited Iran's expected military response to Israel's assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in late July.
Israeli forces have carried out dozens of airstrikes in Syria—including one targeting Iran's consulate in Damascus—since the Hamas-led October 7 attack, which prompted Israel's large-scale assault on Gaza.
Al Jazeera reported that Israeli forces continued to pummel the Palestinian enclave on Monday, bombing "al-Amoudi street in the Sabra neighborhood, south of Gaza City." The outlet noted that "at least 10 people have been killed today in attacks across the Gaza Strip."
"Hundreds of millions of civilians around the world suffer—and hundreds of thousands have died—even in times of ostensible peace under the broad economic sanctions imposed unilaterally and illegally by the United States."
As human rights defenders marked the 75th anniversary of the Fourth Geneva Convention and its prohibition on collective punishment, hundreds of legal experts and groups on Monday urged the global community—and the United States government in particular—"to comply with international law by ending the use of broad, unilateral coercive measures that extensively harm civilian populations."
In a letter to U.S. President Joe Biden, the jurists and legal groups wrote that "75 years ago, in the aftermath of one of the most destructive conflicts in human history, nations of the world came together in Geneva, Switzerland to establish clear legal limits on the treatment of noncombatants in times of war."
"The legal community needs to push back against the narrative that sanctions are nonviolent alternatives to warfare."
"One key provision... is the prohibition of collective punishment, which is considered a war crime," the letter continues. "We consider the unilateral application of certain economic sanctions to constitute collective punishment."
Suzanne Adely, president of the National Lawyers Guild—one of the letter's signatories—said in a statement that "economic sanctions cause direct material harm not only to the people living on the receiving end of these policies, but to those who rely on trade and economic relations with sanctioned countries."
"The legal community needs to push back against the narrative that sanctions are nonviolent alternatives to warfare and hold the U.S. Government accountable for violating international law every time it wields these coercive measures," she added.
The new letter states:
Collective punishment is a standard practice of U.S. foreign policy today in the form of broad, unilateral economic and financial sanctions. While other countries apply sanctions in some form, the United States imposes more unilateral economic sanctions than any other country in the world, by far. Though this method of collective punishment may differ from that of conventional warfare, and is often applied outside of declared military conflict, its collective impact on civilians can be just as indiscriminate, punitive, and deadly.
"Hundreds of millions of people currently live under such broad U.S. economic sanctions in some form, including in notable cases such as Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and Venezuela," the letter notes. "The evidence that these measures can cause severe, widespread civilian harm, including death, is overwhelming. Broad economic sanctions can spark and prolong economic crises, hinder access to essential goods like food, fuel, and medicine, and increase poverty, hunger, disease, and even death rates, especially among children. Such conditions in turn often drive mass migration, as in the recent cases of Cuba and Venezuela."
For more than 64 years, the U.S. has imposed a crippling economic embargo on Cuba that had adversely affected all sectors of the socialist island's economy and severely limited Cubans' access to basic necessities including food, fuel, and medicines. The Cuban government
claims the blockade cost the country's economy nearly $5 billion in just one 11-month period in 2022-23 alone. For the past 32 years, United Nations member states have voted overwhelmingly against the U.S. embargo on Cuba. Last year's vote was 187-2, with the U.S. and Israel as the only dissenters.
According to a 2019 report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a progressive think tank based in Washington, D.C., as many as 40,000 Venezuelans died from 2017-18 to U.S. sanctions, which have made it much more difficult for millions of people to obtain food, medicine, and other necessities.
"Civilian suffering is not merely an incidental cost of these policies, but often their very intent," the new letter asserts. "A 1960 State Department memo on the embargo of Cuba suggested 'denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation, and overthrow of government.'"
"Civilian suffering is not merely an incidental cost of these policies, but often their very intent."
"Asked whether the Trump administration's sanctions on Iran were working as intended, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo responded that 'things are much worse for the Iranian people, and we're convinced that will lead the Iranian people to rise up and change the behavior of the regime,'" the signers added.
Experts have repeatedly noted that while sanctions harm everyday people in targeted countries, leaders of those nations use their positions as dictators to enrich themselves and members of their inner circles. Sanctions also fail to work as intended to topple targeted regimes. Cuba's revolutionary government has outlasted a dozen U.S. presidents. Iran has been under U.S. sanctions since the late 1970s, yet its Islamic regime remains entrenched and has forged closer relations with Russia and China. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is still in power despite two decades of U.S. sanctions. North Korea's dynastic dictatorship shows no signs of cracking after seven decades of sanctions.
Others have highlighted the hypocrisy of the United States sanctioning nations over ideological differences while supporting brutal dictatorships including Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan, and Equatorial Guinea, and other gross human rights violators like apartheid Israel, which is on trial for genocide at the World Court. Instead of punishing Israel, the U.S. House of Representatives—with the assent of dozens of Democratic lawmakers—passed legislation to sanction officials of the International Criminal Court, whose chief prosecutor is seeking to arrest Israeli and Hamas leaders.
"The Geneva Conventions, for all of their limitations and subsequent violations, were a triumph of international law in the protection of civilians during times of war," the new letter asserts. "Yet today, hundreds of millions of civilians around the world suffer—and hundreds of thousands have died—even in times of ostensible peace under the broad economic sanctions imposed unilaterally and illegally by the United States."
"As members of the legal community, we call on the United States to comply with existing international law by ending the use of broad unilateral coercive measures," the signers added. "Seventy-five years after the Geneva Conventions, collective punishment must end."