scholarly journals United States Recognizes Morocco's Sovereignty Over Western Sahara

2021 ◽  
Vol 115 (2) ◽  
pp. 318-323

On December 10, 2020, President Donald J. Trump reversed decades of U.S. policy by announcing that the United States would recognize Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara as part of a deal in which Morocco would normalize relations with Israel. Despite a 1991 UN truce and continued calls by the UN Security Council for Morocco and the Polisario Front to reach a mutually agreeable solution, neither side has relinquished its claim of sovereignty over Western Sahara. Trump's announcement ended nearly thirty years of U.S. support for UN-led negotiations and places the United States at odds with the majority of the international community, which swiftly criticized the U.S. action as a violation of the right to self-determination.

2011 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 218-219

Ambassador Rice made the following statement to the UN Security Council in effort to explain how the United States could veto a draft resolution (see Doc. A4 above) reaffirming the illegality of Israeli settlements that had been carefully crafted to use wording from previous U.S. official statements on the subject under consideration. The text was taken from the United States Mission to the United Nations Web site at usun.state.gov. For background on the resolution and the U.S. veto, see Graham Usher's “Letter from the UN” in this issue


2015 ◽  
Vol 109 (3) ◽  
pp. 569-582 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bing Bing Jia

The fallout from the 2010 Kampala Review Conference for the United States has been explained by Harold Koh and Todd Buchwald, who were officially involved in the negotiations at the conference. The concerns they enumerate serve to implicate, inter alia, two issues of broad importance for the international community: the definition of the crime of aggression, and the clear divide between the positions of the permanent members of the UN Security Council and the rest of the Kampala participants with respect to the Councils role in implementing the Rome Statute’s new provisions on the crime of aggression. This Note, which focuses on those two issues, is partly a response to some of their criticisms and partly an independent assessment of the consequences of the Review Conference. It also evaluates the Kampala amendments to the Rome Statute’in particular, Articles 8 bis, 15 bis, and 15 ter—from the perspective of customary law and considers their impact on the role assigned to the Council under the UN Charter.


2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 83-99
Author(s):  
Jakub Kościółek

The article presents the records collected by the Darfur Atrocities Documentation Team (ADT), which have proved the occurrence of genocide in Darfur. It describes the discussion of the academic community and often conflicting political positions on the issue. The author attempted to analyse the results of the work of the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur (ICID), appointed at the request of the United States by the UN Security Council, which examined the numerous violations of the international law in the province, but did not express an opinion whether or not genocide had taken place in Darfur. He has confronted the collected evidence of crimes committed in Darfur with the “Convention on the prevention and punishment of genocide”, which obliges the international community to intervene when genocide is proved to be happening. The conflict in Darfur has been presented as an example of the ineffectiveness of the response of the international community to genocide. Therefore, an analysis was carried out on the means of effective prevention of genocide, which can be used in future prevention of crimes in other regions of the world.


Worldview ◽  
1969 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 6-7
Author(s):  
Ernest W. Lefever

The passionate “Biafra Lobby” in the United States is a perfect example of the moral and political pitfalls of organized pleading and pressure on particular international problems The pro Biafra crusade is an improbable conglomeration of the New Left and old right idealists and hierlings American citizens and foreigners churchmen and secularists isolationists and interventionists. Though no clear common concern unites these diverse persons most of them agree that the United States Government should do more than it is now doing to feed starving Biafrans and many of them seem to believe that the U.S. hands-off policy toward the brutal civil war in Nigeria is immoral because it interferes with mercy measures and denies the Biafrans the “right of self-determination.”


2011 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 205-206

When Israel resumed settlement construction in September 2010 after a temporary freeze, the Palestinians suspended peace talks until the imposition of a comprehensive settlement freeze including East Jerusalem and began exploring alternative ways forward in the absence of negotiations. The Arab League supported this decision and agreed to work with the Palestinians to seek alternatives until the United States came up with a serious, viable approach to resuming negotiations. The Arab efforts focused on securing international recognition of a Palestinian state and Palestinian rights with individual states and in international fora (see Quarterly Updates in JPS 158 and 159 for details). To this end, the PLO and Arab states began work in mid-December 2010 on a UN Security Council (UNSC) resolution that would reaffirm the illegality of Israeli settlements, using wording carefully cobbled together from U.S. official statements on settlements so as to make it difficult for the United States to oppose the resolution. The draft was submitted by Lebanon with seventy-eight countries as cosponsors. The United States nonetheless vetoed the measure, with all the other UNSC members voting in favor. For the U.S. explanation of its decision to veto, see Doc. D2 below. For more on the background and ramifications of the resolution, see Graham Usher's “Letter from the UN” in this issue. The text of the resolution was taken from the UN's Web site at www.un.org.


Significance Russia on June 28 rejected as “lies” similar allegations by the United States, United Kingdom and France at the UN Security Council. The exchanges come against the backdrop of rising diplomatic tensions between Russia and France in CAR. Impacts Touadera’s ongoing offensive against rebel forces threatens to deliver a fatal blow to the peace deal he struck with them in 2019. Expanding Russian control over key mining sites could be a persistent source of frictions absent sophisticated local arrangements. Human rights concerns will deter some African leaders from engaging with Russia, but not all.


2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rashid I. Khalidi

This essay argues that what has been going on in Palestine for a century has been mischaracterized. Advancing a different perspective, it illuminates the history of the last hundred years as the Palestinians have experienced it. In doing so, it explores key historical documents, including the Balfour Declaration, Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, and UN Security Council Resolution 242, none of which included the Palestinians in key decisions impacting their lives and very survival. What amounts to a hundred years of war against the Palestinians, the essay contends, should be seen in comparative perspective as one of the last major colonial conflicts of the modern era, with the United States and Europe serving as the metropole, and their extension, Israel, operating as a semi-independent settler colony. An important feature of this long war has been the Palestinians' continuing resistance, against heavy odds, to colonial subjugation. Stigmatizing such resistance as “terrorism” has successfully occluded the real history of the past hundred years in Palestine.


2022 ◽  
pp. 63-76

This chapter examines the work of Samuel Huntington and his theory regarding waves of democratization. The chapter notes that the international community is witnessing a move away from the globalized world order that the era has facilitated (or de-globalization) and that de-democratization is seemingly occurring simultaneously. The chapter pays particular attention to the United States and actions that have been viewed as anti-democratic by the previous presidential administration, which has accelerated the global community's leeriness when it comes to international cooperation led by the U.S.


1973 ◽  
Vol 67 (5) ◽  
pp. 21-28
Author(s):  
James M. Wilson ◽  
Angel Calderón-Cruz ◽  
John Tarkong

There can be no doubt that the principle of self-determination is applicable to the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. The UN Charter applies it. The United States as administering authority under its 1947 trusteeship agreement with the Security Council has explicitly and repeatedly recognized its applicability. The real question is precisely what elements of the principle are applicable, how they are to be applied, and within what framework.


1976 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michla Pomerance

Ever since the principle of self-determination entered the lexicon of international politics during World War I, American foreign policymakers have had to contend with problems revolving around that concept. The need to favor one or another claimant, each waving the banner of self-determination and invoking the “right to determine its own fate,” continues to present dilemmas, often extremely troubling ones, for U.S. decisionmakers. Examples from recent history come readily to mind. The entire post-World War II decolonization process entailed an endless series of such dilemmas, and even after formal decolonization was all but completed, such nagging issues as Katanga, Biafra, and Eritrea remained, not to mention the problems of South Africa, Northern Ireland, the Middle East, and Indochina. Indeed, even within America’s own imperial domain, the United States was faced with the conflicting demands of the Puerto Rican nationalists and the majority of the Puerto Rican electorate, the claims of the Marianas as against those of Micronesia as a whole, and demands for cultural autonomy on the part of diverse ethnic groups.


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