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.
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