US 'Will Lose Most' if UN Security Council Veto Right Abolished

On Wednesday, Ukraine's Permanent Representative to the United Nations Yuriy Sergeyev said that 67 member states supported an initiative to end the right of veto, following an October 2013 proposal by French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius to imposing veto limits in extreme cases.

MOSCOW (Sputnik), Alexander Mosesov — The United States stands to lose the most out of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (UNSC) if the veto is abolished, a US anti-war and Democratic Party activist told Sputnik on Friday.

"Removing the power of one nation to veto measures on its own would impact the United States more than any other nation, other than perhaps Israel on whose behalf the United States issues many vetoes. In recent decades the United States has vetoed more than the other four combined," David Swanson said.

Only the five permanent UNSC members, comprising Russia, the United States, China, the United Kingdom and France, have veto power. The right to veto is unconditional and is codified in the UN Charter.

Many argue that the seventy-year-old UN is in need of reform to enable it to more effectively respond to the shifting balance of world power.

Swanson, who co-founded the WarIsACrime.org website and is the Washington director of the Democrats.com online community, suggested that removing veto right from all five nations equally would be "a step toward democratizing the United Nations."

Russian UN envoy Vitaly Churkin stated that Moscow saw a political subtext in calls by representatives of some Western countries, as well as Ukraine, to abolish the use of veto in the UNSC.