UN, March 10. /TASS/. The right to veto is a cornerstone of the UN Security Council and it prompts the global organization’s members to look for possible ways of finding a compromise, Vitaly Churkin, the Russian permanent member to the US-based organization, said on Thursday.
"The right to veto is a cornerstone of the UN architecture," the official website of the Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the United Nations quoted Churkin as saying. "The whole construction would lose stability without it."
"Without the right to veto, the Security Council could turn into an organization churning out decisions aimed at either an undoubted or obtruded global political course, which is by far distant from respecting legal interests of the UN member states," Churkin said.
The Russian diplomat said that countries seeking the annulment of the right to veto, executed by the UN Security Council’s five permanent member states (Russia, Great Britain, China, the United States and France), used to turn to Moscow in the past with such requests as "to use the right of veto to protect their national interests."
"I would like to ask a rhetoric question whether these countries are ready to never turn to us [Russia] with such requests in the future," Churkin said. "Perhaps not a very diplomatic Russian saying can be said in this regard and it goes as ‘cast no dirt into the well that hath given you water’."
The Russian UN envoy said the "modern world is indeed completely different to what it used to be in 1945," when the global organization was set up after the World War II.
"However, it [the modern world] is still too distant from the harmony needed for the UN Security Council to maintain its relevance without the right for veto," he added.