scholarly journals The End of the Road: State Liability for Acts of UN Peacekeeping Contingents After the Dutch Supreme Court’s Judgment in Mothers of Srebrenica (2019)

2019 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 537-553 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cedric Ryngaert ◽  
Otto Spijkers
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Former Yugoslavia ◽  
The Road ◽  
Un Peacekeeping ◽  
International Responsibility ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
State Liability ◽  
Dutch Supreme

Abstract This article provides an analysis of the Dutch Supreme Court judgment in the Mothers of Srebrenica case, placing it in its context, and comparing it with earlier and related decisions, in particular the judgments in the cases of Nuhanović and Mustafić. The Mothers of Srebrenica is a foundation established to represent the interests of the approximately 6000 surviving relatives of the victims of the fall of Srebrenica during the conflict in the former Yugoslavia (1995). The foundation holds the Netherlands responsible for not having done enough to protect the victims of the Srebrenica genocide. This contribution addresses the attribution of the conduct of the United Nations peacekeeping contingent to the troop-contributing State (the Netherlands), followed by the wrongfulness of the peacekeepers’ conduct and the State’s attendant liability for damages suffered by the victims. It is argued that the Dutch State’s international responsibility was only engaged because of the exceptional circumstances present in Srebrenica at the time. In the ordinary course of events, the liability of troop-contributing States is unlikely to be engaged if the Supreme Court’s review standard were to be applied.

scholarly journals The State of the Netherlands v. Respondents & Stichting Mothers of Srebrenica

2020 ◽  
Vol 114 (3) ◽  
pp. 479-486
Author(s):  
Kristen Boon
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
International Organizations ◽  
Supreme Court Decision ◽  
Court Decision ◽  
Safe Area ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
International Responsibility ◽  
Republika Srpska

The July 2019 decision of the Supreme Court of the Netherlands constitutes the final act of a long litigation arising from the July 1995 genocide in Srebrenica. After Bosnian Serb militias attacked the safe area of Srebrenica, members of the Dutch battalion (Dutchbat), which was responsible for safeguarding the enclave under a UN mandate, permitted between 8,000 and 10,000 men and boys to be taken away by Bosnian Serb forces. Those men and boys were eventually killed by forces commanded by General Ratko Mladić and Radovan Karadžić, president of the autonomous Republika Srpska. This Supreme Court decision and related rulings involve issues of international responsibility for the conduct of peacekeepers—in particular, attribution of conduct to the United Nations and its member states and immunity of international organizations.

UN Peacekeeping Operations and Successful Military Diplomacy: A Case Study of Pakistan

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bakare Najimdeen
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Security Council ◽  
United Nations Security Council ◽  
Policy Objective ◽  
Peacekeeping Operations ◽  
Un Peacekeeping ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
Peacekeeping Missions ◽  
Military Diplomacy

Few years following its creation, the United Nations (UN) with the blessing of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) decided to establish the UN Peacekeeping Operations (UNPKO), as a multilateral mechanism geared at fulfilling the Chapter VII of the UN Charter which empowered the Security Council to enforce measurement to maintain or restore international peace and security. Since its creation, the multilateral mechanism has recorded several successes and failures to its credit. While it is essentially not like traditional diplomacy, peacekeeping operations have evolved over the years and have emerged as a new form of diplomacy. Besides, theoretically underscoring the differences between diplomacy and foreign policy, which often appear as conflated, the paper demonstrates how diplomacy is an expression of foreign policy. Meanwhile, putting in context the change and transformation in global politics, particularly global conflict, the paper argues that traditional diplomacy has ceased to be the preoccupation and exclusive business of the foreign ministry and career diplomats, it now involves foot soldiers who are not necessarily diplomats but act as diplomats in terms of peacekeeping, negotiating between warring parties, carrying their countries’ emblems and representing the latter in resolving global conflict, and increasingly becoming the representation of their countries’ foreign policy objective, hence peacekeeping military diplomacy. The paper uses decades of Pakistan’s peacekeeping missions as a reference point to establish how a nation’s peacekeeping efforts represent and qualifies as military diplomacy. It also presented the lessons and good practices Pakistan can sell to the rest of the world vis-à-vis peacekeeping and lastly how well Pakistan can consolidate its peacekeeping diplomacy.

Australia and Indonesian Independence

1967 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 226-239 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. J. Hudson
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
South West ◽  
South West Africa ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
Southern Rhodesia ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The One ◽  
United Nations Charter

Relations between Australia and Indonesia became strained within months of Indonesia's attainment of independence, deteriorating as conflict developed first on the question of West Irian and then as a result of Indonesia's hostility towards Malaysia. For many years, it seemed ironical that Australia should have played a major part in the emergence of a neighbour whose external policies and internal trends endangered rather than safeguarded Australian interests. But there is more involved here than historical irony in the context of Australian-Indonesian relations. Sufficient time has now elapsed for Australian policy on the Indonesian independence question to be seen in the wider context of the whole postwar phenomenon of decolonisation. For it is not merely of interest that Australia should have assisted neighbouring Asian rebels against a European colonial Power (remembering that Australia herself was, and is, a European colonial Power) and should then have been embarrassed by the activities of the rebels coming to office. It is of greater interest that, of the immense number of colonial issues anxiously engaging the attention of international society in the 1940s and 1950s, the years which saw the virtual demise of western colonialism, this was the one issue on which Australia took up the rebel cause. Throughout this period and irrespective of the complexion of the parties in power in Canberra, Australia persistently jeopardised her regional objective of friendly relations with anti-colonial Asia by opposing strongly and, at times, bitterly the anti-colonial cause in the United Nations. If nothing else, the United Nations has provided a forum in which each year Australia and other members have been forced to declare themselves on colonial questions. And, until the 1960s when Australia switched policy, Australia fought against all the anti-colonial Powers' largely successful attempts to have developed a system of international control over colonies under the authority of Chapter XI (“Declaration Regarding Non-Self-Governing Territories”) of the United Nations charter, to tighten the trusteeship system of supervision erected under Chapters XII and XIII of the charter, and to involve the United Nations in particular disputes so as to meet alleged threats to peace — all of them being attempts, however indirectly, to hasten the attainment of independence by dependent territories. Thus, Australia supported South Africa on South-West Africa, the Netherlands on West New Guinea, the British on Southern Rhodesia and Oman, the Portuguese on their African territories, the French on Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria. But Australia opposed the Netherlands on the Indonesian question.

Security Council

1950 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-116
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Security Council ◽  
Round Table ◽  
Successful Outcome ◽  
Substantial Role ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
The Republic

With the signature on November 2, 1949, of a comprehensive Covering Resolution, the Round Table Conference on the Indonesian question reached an “eminently successful” conclusion, the United Nations Commission for Indonesia reported to the Security Council on November 8. Agreement had been reached by representatives of the Netherlands, the Republic of Indonesia, and the Federal Consultative Assembly on transfer of sovereignty over Indonesia, the statute of the Netherlands-Indonesian Union, and a series of related problems. The commission's report, to which Conference agreements were appended, noted that the commission had taken part in the conference in accordance with its terms of reference, and had played a substantial role in the successful outcome.

The Rôle of the General Assembly of the United Nations in the Admission of Members

1949 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 246-261 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie Stuart Klooz
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Security Council ◽  
General Assembly ◽  
The Third ◽  
The United Nations

The effort of the delegate from Argentina to press the admission of certain states into the United Nations despite the negative vote of one of the five permanent members of the Security Council was denounced by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Poland, Belgium, Pakistan, The Netherlands, and France as being contrary to the provisions of the Charter in the discussion on the adoption of the agenda during the Third Session of the General Assembly. These states held that even discussion of such an item by the Assembly was illegal.

Rape and Human Rights

PMLA ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 121 (5) ◽  
pp. 1662-1664 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean Franco
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Ethnic Group ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
International Criminal Tribunal ◽  
Former Yugoslavia ◽  
Crimes Against Humanity ◽  
Geneva Conventions ◽  
War Criminals ◽  
The United Nations

According to the report of the United Nations commission on Human Rights, rape is the least condemned war crime (coomaraswamy, Further Promotion 64n263). Although wartime rape was listed as a crime against humanity by the Nuremberg Military Tribunals and by the Geneva Conventions, it was not until 2001 that the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia identified rapists as war criminals. In that year the tribunal sentenced three men for violations of the laws or customs of war (torture, rape) and crimes against humanity (torture, rape) committed during the war in Bosnia during the 1993 takeover of Foca, where women were systematically raped and killed, the purpose being “to destroy an ethnic group by killing it, to prevent its reproduction or to disorganize it, removing it from its home soil.”

UN Peacekeeping Operations: Applicability of International Humanitarian Law and Responsibility for Operations-Related Damage

2000 ◽  
Vol 94 (2) ◽  
pp. 406-412 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daphna Shraga
Keyword(s):  
United Nations ◽  
International Committee ◽  
Red Cross ◽  
International Humanitarian Law ◽  
Humanitarian Law ◽  
Peacekeeping Operations ◽  
Geneva Conventions ◽  
Un Peacekeeping ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
First Time

In the five decades that followed the Korea operation, where for the first time the United Nations commander agreed, at the request of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), to abide by the humanitarian provisions of the Geneva Conventions, few UN operations lent themselves to the applicability of international humanitarian law

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