Chapter 1:   THE CONSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORK

Section 2:   The Charter

 

Liquidity crisis measures impacting the Security Council are inconsistent with Charter Articles 28(1), 30 and 98

 

On 7 February 2025, the Secretary-General wrote to all UN Member States informing them that owing to the Organization’s growing liquidity crisis, he was announcing additional cash conservation measures for the 2025 regular budget operations. These measures were subsequently set out in an Annex to a letter from the Secretary-General’s Chef de Cabinet addressed to the General Assembly President dated 21 February 2025. And on 30 January 2025, during the “Other matters” segment of closed consultations, Security Council members were briefed on the financial situation of the Organization by a high official of the Department of General Assembly and Conference Management.

 

A number of the announced cash conservation measures would have direct impact on the functioning of the Security Council, as follows:

 

1.  Meetings and interpretation services

 

Under this heading in the Annex appear the following measures which would apply, inter alia, to the Security Council:

 

• Meetings and events in conference rooms may be held only on weekdays and during the official meeting hours of 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

 

• Requests for meetings and events to take place in conference rooms before 10 a.m. or after 6 p.m. on weekdays, or at any time on weekends, cannot be accommodated.

 

• It should be noted that interpretation services provided by the Department for General

Assembly and Conference Management are available only for meetings held from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and from 3 to 6 p.m.

 

• Bodies entitled to meet “as required” will be provided with interpretation services strictly on an “if available” basis.

 

• No more than a total of 55 meetings funded through the regular budget, including those of the General Assembly and the Security Council, can be provided with interpretation services in a given week (our emphasis).

 

• All meeting bodies with a session of 10 meetings or more are to reduce their number of meetings by at least 10% and adjust their programmes of work accordingly.

 

As can be seen, owing to the liquidity crisis, only restricted funds are now being made available for conference servicing and interpretation, which risks placing limitations on the scheduling, frequency, and duration of Security Council meetings. This, however, runs counter to Article 28(1) of the Charter, which provides:

 

“The Security Council shall be so organized as to be able to function continuously. Each member of the Security Council shall for this purpose be represented at all times at the seat of the Organization” (our emphasis).

 

To meet the requirement set out in Article 28(1) that the Council be able to “function continuously”, the second sentence of the article obligates each Council member to “be represented at all times at the seat of the Organization”. However, in addition to this duty explicitly imposed on Security Council members, scholars of the Charter who wrote soon after its adoption, as well as Charter experts writing contemporaneously, read Article 28(1) as also establishing a parallel responsibility for the UN Secretariat.

 

Leland M. Goodrich and Edvard Hambro, writing in 1946, stated that the provision in Article 28(1) for the Council’s continuous functioning also

 

“refers to the administrative organization of the Council, a matter which will presumably be taken care of in connection with the organization of the Secretariat . . .”[1]

 

More contemporaneously, Konrad Bühler, writing in the 2024 edition of The Charter of the United Nations: A Commentary edited by Bruno Simma et al., draws a similar conclusion:

 

“While expressly Art 28(1) only refers to an obligation of SC members, the requirement of ‘continuous functioning’ of the SC also entails an obligation of the UN Secretariat to provide the necessary organizational and logistical support to the SC.”

 

In this context, Bühler notes the role of the UN Secretariat’s Security Council Affairs Division which, he writes, assists the Council in carrying out its responsibilities by ensuring, inter alia, the provision of “logistical support to the meetings (eg conference services and interpretation; translation and printing of documents, etc.”.[2]

 

In connection with the ability of the Security Council to “function continuously”, the first sentence of Article 98 is also relevant. This sentence states:

 

“The Secretary-General shall act in that capacity in all meetings of the General Assembly, of the Security Council, of the Economic and Social Council, and of the Trusteeship Council, and shall perform such other functions as are entrusted to him by these organs.”[3] (our emphasis)

 

It follows that whenever the Security Council decides to convene a meeting, it is entrusting to the Secretariat, under Article 98, the functions of assuring the provision of all necessary conference and interpretation services without which the meeting could not be held.

 

As for any obligation on the part of Council members to reduce the number of Security Council meetings, the frequency of meetings is not exclusively a decision of the Security Council as a whole. Rule 2 of the Council’s Provisional Rules of Procedure states that the Council President “shall call a meeting of the Security Council at the request of any member of the Security Council” (our emphasis). And in addition, any UN Member State, the General Assembly or the Secretary-General also can obligate the Council to meet. Rule 3 of the Council’s Provisional Rules of Procedure provides that

 

“The President shall call a meeting of the Security Council if a dispute or situation is brought to the attention of the Security Council under Article 35 or under Article 11(3) of the Charter, or if the General Assembly makes recommendations or refers any question to the Security Council under Article 11(2), or if the Secretary-General brings to the attention of the Security Council any matter under Article 99.” (our emphasis)

 

In this connection, under Article 30 of the Charter, “The Security Council shall adopt its own rules of procedure, including the method of selecting its President.”[4] This the Council has done through its Provisional Rules of Procedure, formally adopted on 17 January 1946.[5] Thus the entitlement, under Rules 2 and 3, of any Council member, UN Member State, the General Assembly or the Secretary-General to request a meeting, which the Council "shall" then convene, cannot be curtailed by an executive decision of the Secretariat.

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Moreover, the Council’s Rule 1 places exclusively in the hands of the Security Council President the timing of any Council meeting, and this authority also cannot be curtailed by an executive decision of the Secretariat. Rule 1 states

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“Meetings of the Security Council shall, with the exception of the periodic meetings referred to in rule 4, be held at the call of the President at any time he deems necessary” (our emphasis).

 

As regards limiting hours of interpretation, the Council’s Rule 42 states, without qualification, that “Speeches made in any of the six languages of the Security Council shall be interpreted into the other five languages.” (our emphasis)

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2.  Documentation – verbatim records

 

In the Annex to the Chef de Cabinet’s letter of 21 February 2025, under the heading “Documentation”, additional cash conservation measures relevant to the Security Council are set out. One of these measures states

 

“The issuance of verbatim records of the General Assembly and Security Council and other bodies with such entitlements will incur significant delays; verbatim records will continue to be processed as funding and capacity allows.” (our emphasis)

 

In this connection, it is again recalled that under Article 30 of the Charter, “The Security Council shall adopt its own rules of procedure”. Accordingly, the Security Council was acting under this Charter authority when it adopted its Rule 49, which states:

 

“Subject to the provisions of rule 51, the verbatim record of each meeting of the Security Council shall be made available to the representatives on the Security Council and to the representatives of any other States which have participated in the meeting not later than 10 a.m. of the first working day following the meeting.”[6] (our emphasis)

 

Originally, pursuant to Rules 50, 52 and 53, this next-morning availability was for the purpose of receiving any proposed corrections before each verbatim record was published in its finalized form. However, a 1993 Note by the Council President (S/26389) established that a correction exercise would no longer be required. Rather, the verbatim record to be made available the following morning was to be the final version.

 

Relevant to implementing Rule 49 and its timeframe for the issuance of the Council’s verbatim records is again the first sentence of Article 98. To recall, this article states

 

“The Secretary-General shall act in that capacity in all meetings of the General Assembly, of the Security Council, of the Economic and Social Council, and of the Trusteeship Council, and shall perform such other functions as are entrusted to him by these organs.”[7] (our emphasis)

 

It follows that by establishing, under Rule 49, a timeframe for the issuance of verbatim records, the Security Council is entrusting to the Secretariat the function of ensuring that this timing is met.

 

 

3.  Meetings coverage

 

There is an interrelationship between two of the cash conservation measures affecting the Security Council. If there comes to be a suspension – either explicit or implicit – of the Rule 49 requirement that verbatim records are to be issued the morning after a Council meeting, the resulting delays will place heightened importance on the timely availability of webcasts of Council meetings. It is essential for Council members themselves to be able to refer quickly to an exact record of what has been said at all Security Council meetings. This is true also for the wider UN membership, especially for delegations not able to attend a Council meeting in person. However, under the Annex heading “Meetings coverage”, a measure is set out by which “Weekend Council consultations that go on to unexpected open meetings may not be covered by UNTV, Webcast/UN Web TV or UN Photo” (our emphasis). For there to be neither a timely verbatim record nor a quickly available webcast of an emergency Security Council meeting would leave a critical gap in the record of the Council’s functioning.

 

Another question arises as to the webcasting of Arria-formula meetings. The economy measures set out by the Chef de Cabinet include a provision which states that

"Webcast coverage will be limited to the numbered plenary meetings of the General Assembly, the Security Council, ECOSOC and the Human Rights Council, and meetings where funding has been approved and allocated to DGC in the 2025 budget. Any other meetings will be covered on a cost-recovery basis only."

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Arria-fomula meetings are not "numbered plenary meetings" of the Security Council, and in fact are not "Council activities" at all, but rather are convened by one or more Council members in their national capacity. In recent years, most conveners have requested, and normally have obtained, UN webcasting of the entirety of their Arria-formula meetings. However, since the liquidity crisis measures went into effect as of February 2025, it remains to be seen whether webcasting Arria-formula meetings will come under funding "approved and allocated" to the Department of Global Communications, or whether such webcasting will be obtainable "on a cost-recovery basis only."

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Concluding observations

 

It can be seen from the above review of relevant Charter articles, as well as Rules 1, 2, 3, 42 and 49 of the Council’s Provisional Rules of Procedure, that the Secretariat’s directives to address the UN’s liquidity crisis have strayed beyond what, under the Charter, the Secretariat itself has the power to decide. The measures, in effect, unilaterally amend the Charter by creating restrictions – albeit with good cause – on the Security Council’s Charter-enshrined empowerment to “function continuously” and also on the Council’s authority, under Article 30, to decide when and how often it will schedule its meetings, for which it should receive the necessary Secretariat assistance, as well as the timing by which the Secretariat will publish Security Council verbatim records.

 

Security Council members undoubtedly understand that the UN’s liquidity crisis poses a severe threat to the Organization’s ability to deliver on Charter-mandated responsibilities and commitments, and that therefore Council members have a sober responsibility to keep Council expenditures to a strict minimum for the foreseeable future. At the same time, the absolute primacy of the Charter must be respected. In this light, it is incumbent upon the General Assembly and the Secretariat, working together, to ensure that future budget decisions give priority to the funds necessary for the Security Council to be able to fulfill its Charter-protected functions under Articles 28(1) and 30.

 

(This update supplements pages 19-21, 25-28, 37-38, 97-100 and 193-212 of the book.)

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[1] Leland M. Goodrich and Edvard Hambro, Charter of the United Nations: Commentary and Documents, Boston, World Peace Foundation, 1946, p. 135.

[2] Bruno Simma, et al. (eds.), The Charter of the United Nations: A Commentary, 4th edn, 2 vols, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2024, pp. 1243-1244. Abbreviations are those used in the Commentary.

[3] Here the reference to the “Secretary-General” is taken to include the staff of the Secretariat performing their duties under the Secretary-General’s authority, as set out in Chapter XV of the Charter entitled, “The Secretariat”.

[4] A similar authorization to adopt its own rules of procedure is granted to the General Assembly by Article 21, and to ECOSOC by Article 72(1).

[5] Notwithstanding the fact that the word “Provisional” has been retained in the title of the Council’s Rules of Procedure since 1946, these Rules have been fully adopted and have the same binding legal status as the rules of the General Assembly and ECOSOC. See related article on this website.

[6] Rule 51 provides that “The Security Council may decide that for a private meeting the record shall be made in a single copy alone. This record shall be kept by the Secretary-General. The representatives of the States which have participated in the meeting shall, within a period of ten days, inform the Secretary-General of any corrections they wish to have made in this record.”

[7] Here the reference to the “Secretary-General” is taken to include the Secretariat performing its duties under the Secretary-General’s authority, as set out in Chapter XV of the Charter entitled, “The Secretariat”.