With a Little Help from My Friends? Keeping Voting Rights in the UNGA

• In Event: UN Voting and the Security Council

Abstract

Member states of the United Nations may lose their voting rights due
to the non-payment of dues, which according to Coggins and Morse
(2022) is the cause for a large share of the absences in roll called
votes. While the rules for losing the voting rights are quite clear,
namely having failed to pay in full the dues for two consecutive
years, not all laggards/defaulters lose their voting rights, as the
Committee on Contributions has some leeway in proposing which member
states should lose these rights (a decision, ultimately made by the
United Nations General Assembly itself). Drawing on a complete set of
decisions on voting rights withdrawals, it can be shown that these
decisions are not free from political influence. These %initial
results suggest that withdrawals of voting rights need to be studied
in more detail and their political nature being taken into account
when analyzing voting records, particularly absences.

Author

• Simon Hug, University of Geneva