United Nations Peacekeeping

Report Outline
Crisis Over Paying for Peacekeeping
Creation and Financing of U.N. Forces
Search for New Peacekeeping Formula
Special Focus

Crisis Over Paying for Peacekeeping

Approaching Showdown on Russia's U.N. Vote

The General Assembly of the United Nations, scheduled to convene for its 19th regular session on Nov. 10, may have to deal with a constitutional crisis brought on by refusal of the Russians to pay their share of the costs of U.N. military operations in the Congo and the Middle East. Unless the Soviet Union remits about $9 million to the world organization between now and November—out of the total of around $55 million which it owes—it will be liable to the penalty prescribed by Article 19 of the U.N. Charter. Article 19 provides that a member state “in arrears in the payment of its financial contributions to the organization shall have no vote in the General Assembly if the amount of its arrears equals or exceeds the amount of the contributions due from it for the preceding two full years.”

The wording of Article 19 seems to indicate that loss of voting rights in the General Assembly is automatic, but Moscow disputes this interpretation. It contends that imposition of the penalty must be approved by two-thirds of all Assembly members present and voting. The closest thing to a test of the question came during the special Assembly session which began last May 14. Haiti was then more than two years in arrears, but its representative stayed away from all meetings until enough of the debt had been paid off to avoid incurring the penalty prescribed by Article 19. Muhammad Zafrulla Khan, president of the Assembly, said that if the representative had not been absent in the interval, he would have announced that Haiti had lost its vote.

The United States, which has paid almost one-half of the cost of the Congo and Middle East peacekeeping forces, is not disposed to let the Russians continue to defy the United Nations. Adlai E. Stevenson, U.S. Representative to the United Nations, said last Dec. 18 that “Rigid adherence to the law, to the Charter, is essential to the Charter's preservation.” He added: “Once you begin to contaminate or erode or interpret the Charter too flexibly, you very soon will have no sustaining body of legal structure to support the United Nations.” The State Department takes the position that refusal to pay for peacekeeping operations amounts to exercise of a financial veto.