UNSC Veto Power Symposium: Voluntary Veto Restraint Initiatives as Evidence of the Global Community’s Disapproval of the Use of the Veto Power

It is my pleasure to contribute this guest post to the Opinio Juris symposium about Professor Jennifer Trahans’s recent book Existing Legal Limits to Security Council Veto Power in the Face of Atrocity Crimes. Professor Trahan’s book is a significant contribution to existing literature on the subject of the Security Council and the role that it plays in addressing, and potentially preventing and halting, atrocity crimes. My post will focus on Chapter 3, Initiatives to Voluntarily Restrain Veto Use as to the Face of Atrocity Crimes, as this chapter presents a thorough discussion of various voluntary initiatives by P5 and other countries to restrain the use of the veto power, a subject that is seldom addressed by other authors