Five countries influential in world affairs

The permanent members of the United Nations Security Council

The permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (also known as the Permanent Five, Big Five, or P5) are the five sovereign states to whom the UN Charter of 1945 grants a permanent seat on the UN Security Council: China, France, Russia,^{[1][a][2][b][3][c]} the United Kingdom, and the United States.^[4][5]

The permanent members were all allies in World War II (and the victors of that war), and are also all states with nuclear weapons. The remaining 10 members of the council are elected by the General Assembly, giving a total of 15 UN member states. All five permanent members have the power of veto, which enables any one of them to prevent the adoption of any “substantive” draft Council resolution, regardless of its level of international support.^[6]

Permanent members[edit]

The following is a table of the current permanent members of the U.N. Security Council.

History[edit]

The original permanent members of the United Nations Security Council in 1945 (dark blue) with their respective colonies and other holdings shown (pale blue).

At the UN’s founding in 1945, the five permanent members of the Security Council were the French Republic, the Republic of China, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States. There have been two seat changes since then, although these have not been reflected in Article 23 of the United Nations Charter, as it has not been accordingly amended:

Additionally, France reformed its provisional government into the French Fourth Republic in 1946 and later into the French Fifth Republic in 1958, both under the leadership of Charles de Gaulle. France maintained its seat as there was no change in its international status or recognition, although many of its overseas possessions eventually became independent.

The five permanent members of the Security Council were the victorious powers in World War II and have maintained the world’s most powerful military forces ever since. They annually top the list of countries with the highest military expenditures along with India and Germany; in 2011, they spent over US$1 trillion combined on defence, accounting for over 60% of global military expenditures (the U.S. alone accounting for over 40%). They are also among the world’s top 10 largest arms exporters and are the only nations officially recognised as “nuclear-weapon states” under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), though there are other states known or believed to be in possession of nuclear weapons.

Veto power[edit]

The “power of veto” refers to the veto power wielded solely by the permanent members, enabling them to prevent the adoption of any “substantive” draft Council resolution, regardless of the level of international support for the draft. The veto does not apply to procedural votes, which is significant in that the Security Council’s permanent membership can vote against a “procedural” draft resolution, without necessarily blocking its adoption by the council.

The veto is exercised when any permanent member—the so-called “P5” casts a “negative” vote on a “substantive” draft resolution. Abstention or absence from the vote by a permanent member does not prevent a draft resolution from being adopted.

Expansion[edit]

There have been proposals suggesting the introduction of new permanent members. The candidates usually mentioned are Brazil, Germany, India, and Japan. They compose the group of four countries known as the G4 nations, which mutually support one another’s bids for permanent seats.^[16]

This sort of reform has traditionally been opposed by the Uniting for Consensus group, which is composed primarily of nations that are regional rivals and economic competitors of the G4. The group is composed of Italy and Spain (opposing Germany), Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina (opposing Brazil), Pakistan (opposing India), and South Korea (opposing Japan), in addition to Turkey, Indonesia and others. Since 1992, Italy and other council members have instead proposed semi-permanent seats or expanding the number of temporary seats.^{[citation needed]}

Most of the leading candidates for permanent membership are regularly elected onto the Security Council by their respective groups. Japan was elected for eleven two-year terms, Brazil for ten terms, and Germany for three terms. India has been elected to the council eight times in total, with the most recent successful bid being in 2020.

In 2013, the P5 and G4 members of the UN Security Council accounted for eight of the world’s ten largest defence budgets, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

Current leaders of the permanent members[edit]

The following are the heads of government that represent the permanent members of the UN Security Council as of 2022^[update]:

Footnotes[edit]

References[edit]

Further reading[edit]

See also[edit]

NewPP limit report
Parsed by mw1414
Cached time: 20220305111038
Cache expiry: 1814400
Reduced expiry: false
Complications: [vary‐revision‐sha1] CPU time usage: 0.775 seconds
Real time usage: 0.982 seconds
Preprocessor visited node count: 6121/1000000
Post‐expand include size: 176032/2097152 bytes
Template argument size: 13517/2097152 bytes
Highest expansion depth: 14/100
Expensive parser function count: 11/500
Unstrip recursion depth: 1/20
Unstrip post‐expand size: 63523/5000000 bytes
Lua time usage: 0.292/10.000 seconds
Lua memory usage: 7606724/52428800 bytes
Number of Wikibase entities loaded: 0/400


Transclusion expansion time report (%,ms,calls,template)
100.00% 750.897 1 -total
27.96% 209.915 7 Template:Navbox
25.44% 190.999 2 Template:Reflist
16.11% 120.942 9 Template:Cite_web
15.22% 114.319 1 Template:UN_Security_Council
10.85% 81.470 1 Template:Short_description
9.11% 68.426 11 Template:Flagicon
7.62% 57.240 4 Template:Fix
7.33% 55.071 21 Template:Flag
6.98% 52.432 2 Template:Cn

Saved in parser cache with key enwiki:pcache:idhash:36480350-0!canonical and timestamp 20220305111037 and revision id 1075118627. Serialized with JSON.