If a government has a coup/collapses, do the new coup leaders automatically represent the government in the UN?
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National leaders don’t represent their countries at the UN – that’s the job of a country’s ambassador to the UN. The UN doesn’t recognize the legitimacy of a country or a country’s leader – that’s up to individual member states, which as a practical matter, means the 5 permanent members of the UN Security Council. The UN can vote to expel a member, but that’s only happened once. The big thing to understand is that the UN doesn’t really do anything as a monolithic entity because it isn’t one – it’s a group of countries, so anything the UN does is by agreement of the members. So the question isn’t “does the UN do something”, it’s “how do the member states vote in any particular situation/”
The leader of a country doesn’t matter for UN membership, nor does it matter how that leader came to power. It’s the *country’s* membership in the UN as a state, not the personal membership of the leader. There are and have been in history multiple times when the leadership of a country was disputed. For example, several years ago Juan Guiado claimed to be the legitimate president of Venezuela instead of Nicolas Maduro. That was irrelevant to Venezuela’s membership in the UN because it’s Venezuela’s seat, not the seat of the president of Venezuela.
Similarly, there are governments that both claim to be the only legitimate country of China: the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan. The government of Taiwan used to hold the PRC’s permanent seat until the UN General Assembly voted to expel Taiwan and recognize the PRC as the legitimate China. But again, that’s each member of the UN voted, there’s no automatic action taken by the UN as a single entity. Even though the government of Taiwan lost the Chinese Civil War in 1949 and took control of all of mainland China then, it held a seat at the UN until 1971 because the members of the UN didn’t agree until 1971 to kick out Taiwan and to recognize the PRC as the rightful holder of China’s UN seat.
Nope, most certainly not.
In fact, we have a prime example of this in ROC/PRC (Taiwan and China). It took the UN over 20 years to recognize the PRC as the official government of China, and for the entire duration between 1949, when the Communists actually took over and the ROC government was driven out to Taiwan, and 1971 when the UN finally recognized the PRC, the official representative of “China” as a whole at the UN was the ROC.
Automatically? No.
For example, the Chinese Civil War. The UN continued to recognize the *Kuomintang* – the Chinese nationalist government that was fighting the Chinese communists – as the legitimate Chinese government all the way up until 1971, long after the *Kuomintang* had lost control of the mainland and fled into exile on Taiwan in 1949.
No.
While your new government becomes the de facto government of your state with the ability and legitimacy to administer the country, that only applies domestically – everyone else can choose to recognize you as legitimate or not, which affects your ability to be invited to the UN.
This means that your new government can get recognized almost immediately (as is the case for the Aquino Administration in the Philippines in 1986) or it could get recognized never (as is the case for the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia which eventually applied as a new nation under the name Serbia and Montenegro, rescinding their original claim).
As a rule of thumb, the UN/countries recognize the former government until it recognizes the new government.
The new leaders are typically the military leaders when a coup takes place, so while I’m not sure I’m guessing it’s not unheard of for those military leaders to represent the nation in the UN at some point. But I can’t think of any examples offhand.
I do know that the UN can just as easily reject a coup and call for the reinstatement of whoever was deposed, in which case I can’t imagine any of the coup leaders representing the country in the UN. And I CAN name examples of this…in west central Africa there’s been several military coups in recent years…a SUSPICIOUS AMOUNT in such a concentrated part of the world, in fact…but that’s another explanation for a different five year old.
Excellent fucking question, btw.
Often, yes.
As has been said by earlier commenters, countries are members of the UN. Governments, heads of state, and heads of government are not.
Normally, a successful change of government, even if violent or extra-constitutional, carries with it a transfer of the ability to send and receive ambassadors. If this ability isn’t seriously contested by the previous government, it won’t be contested by the UN either.
However, if there is a serious contest, the UN General Assembly might vote on which government to recognise. The vote of each member country’s delegation would naturally mirror the foreign policy of the government of that member country.
It’s my understanding that such a vote was how Taiwan lost its UN seat. Taiwan as such was never expelled; the General Assembly changed its mind on whether the government in Taipei or the government in Beijing was the rightful government of all of China (mainland plus Taiwan).
The [UN Charter](https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/full-text) also provides an option to suspend or expel a member. But again this requires a conscious decision, and doesn’t automatically happen just because the new government took power in an illegal and unconstitutional, or even violent, manner.
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