The five-state veto power at the UN Security Council has “no place in the 21st century” and its misuse is spreading “anachronism”, the Irish foreign minister said on Saturday.

“The veto should go, in our view, it’s an anachronism,” Micheal Martin said at the Munich Security Conference in Germany, referring to the United States using its veto power on several occasions to block a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.

“It has no place in the 21st century. It really hasn’t,” Martin said, pledging that “we really have to keep the pressure on that.”

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“We are in no doubt that the Security Council is dysfunctional,” Martin continued, criticizing the “dysfunctionality and the abuse of the veto situation at the Security Council.”

The Irish minister also noted that “the Security Council hasn’t managed (to issue) a statement even on Ukraine. That is an extraordinary failure,” and the resolutions on Gaza “have been weak.”

“There’s been more veto than action at the Security Council on Gaza for example,” he said.

On December 8, the United States vetoed a United Nations resolution Friday backed by almost all other Security Council members and dozens of other nations demanding an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza.

The US had already vetoed a Brazilian UNSC resolution calling for a ceasefire to facilitate humanitarian aid deliveries to the besieged Gaza Strip.

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According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, 28,858 Palestinians have been killed, and 68,677 wounded in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza starting on October 7.

Moreover, at least 7,000 people are unaccounted for, presumed dead under the rubble of their homes throughout the Strip. 

Palestinian and international organizations say that the majority of those killed and wounded are women and children.

The Israeli aggression has also resulted in the forceful displacement of nearly two million people from all over the Gaza Strip, with the vast majority of the displaced forced into the densely crowded southern city of Rafah near the border with Egypt – in what has become Palestine’s largest mass exodus since the 1948 Nakba.

(PC, AA)