Charter Amendment

The procedure for amending the UN Charter is set out in Article 108 (individual amendments) and Article 109 (general review conference). Under Article 108, an amendment enters into force once it has been adopted by a two-thirds vote of the General Assembly and ratified, in accordance with their respective constitutional processes, by two-thirds of UN member states — a group that must include all five permanent members of the Security Council (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States). This effectively gives each P5 member a veto over any structural change to the Charter.

Article 109 allows for a General Conference of UN members to review the Charter, convened by a two-thirds vote of the General Assembly and a vote of any nine Security Council members. No such conference has ever been held, though the question was placed on the GA agenda in 1955.

In practice, the Charter has been amended only a handful of times, all involving the size of UN organs:

• Articles 23, 27, and 61 were amended in 1963 (entered into force 1965) to enlarge the Security Council from 11 to 15 members and raise the required affirmative votes from 7 to 9, and to expand ECOSOC from 18 to 27 members.
• Article 61 was amended again in 1971 (in force 1973) to further expand ECOSOC to 54 members.
• Article 109 was amended in 1965 (in force 1968) to update the Security Council voting threshold for convening a review conference.

Proposals for further reform — particularly enlargement of the Security Council and reform of the veto, advanced by groupings such as the G4 (Brazil, Germany, India, Japan) and the African Union's Ezulwini Consensus (2005) — have stalled largely because of the P5 ratification requirement. In Model UN, delegates should remember that Charter amendment is distinct from ordinary GA resolutions: it cannot be achieved by a simple majority vote on the floor.