The U.S. Congress and the Rhodesian Chrome Issue

1972 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 2-7
Author(s):  
Gale W. McGee

The passage of legislation late in 1971 which in effect caused the United States unilaterally to breach the United Nations sanctions against Southern Rhodesia surely constitutes one of the most shameful episodes in the recent conduct of our country's international affairs. One commentator quite correctly did not mince words in describing the action as a “chrome-plated treaty violation.” And yet, even today, it is doubtful whether any great numbers of American citizens realize that their government has broken its treaty obligations to an international institution which our country did most to initiate and to promote until very recent times. An especially saddening aspect of the affair is the fact that an Administration which rightly has condemned and often contested growing neo-isolationist sentiment in our society's outlook on the world scarcely lifted a finger to prevent precisely the kind of result it decried.

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1951 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 293-294

SINCE it was established in 1946, the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund has been a powerful influence in marshalling both funds and personnel in the interests of children throughout the troubled and underdeveloped areas of the world. For the needs of UNICEF an appropriation of $5,750,000 has been approved by the Senate and the House for the current fiscal year (July 1, 1951-June 30, 1952). This appropriation, which now awaits the approval of the President, is a marked decrease from the $15,000,000 authorized last year, or even the $12,500,000 requested by the President for this year. Furthermore, a report which still stands on the record as far as the House is concerned, stipulates that the U.S. contribution should not exceed 33% of the amount contributed by other governments, a marked change in the matching formula in which, heretofore, the United States has contributed 72% with 28% from other countries. The funds contributed by the United States, limited as they are for a world program, have stimulated other countries to meet the matching requirement and thus make larger contributions of their own. Forty-eight countries have contributed to the fund. Also, it may be noted that the bill as passed refers to the total amount contributed by other governments; the Senate in its report indicated that the total amount might include internal matching by other governments as well as the regular contributions of donor countries.


2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Wertheim

Why did the United States want to create the United Nations Organization, or any international political organization with universal membership? This question has received superficial historiographical attention, despite ample scrutiny of the conferences that directly established the UN in 1944 and 1945. The answer lies earlier in the war, from 1940 to 1942, when, under the pressure of fast-moving events, American officials and intellectuals decided their country must not only enter the war but also lead the world long afterwards. International political organization gained popularity – first among unofficial postwar planners in 1941 and then among State Department planners in 1942 – because it appeared to be an indispensable tool for implementing postwar US world leadership, for projecting and in no way constraining American power. US officials believed the new organization would legitimate world leadership in the eyes of the American public by symbolizing the culmination of prior internationalist efforts to end power politics, even as they based the design of the UN on a thoroughgoing critique of the League, precisely for assuming that power politics could be transcended.


2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 263-295
Author(s):  
Keith Allan Clark II

In 1955, Jiang Tingfu, representing the Republic of China (roc), vetoed Mongolia’s entry into the United Nations. In the 26 years the roc represented China in the United Nations, it only cast this one veto. The roc’s veto was a contentious move because Taipei had recognized Mongolia as a sovereign state in 1946. A majority of the world body, including the United States, favored Mongolia’s admission as part of a deal to end the international organization’s deadlocked-admissions problem. The roc’s veto placed it not only in opposition to the United Nations but also its primary benefactor. This article describes the public and private discourse surrounding this event to analyze how roc representatives portrayed the veto and what they thought Mongolian admission to the United Nations represented. It also examines international reactions to Taipei’s claims and veto. It argues that in 1955 Mongolia became a synecdoche for all of China that Taipei claimed to represent, and therefore roc representatives could not acknowledge it as a sovereign state.


1987 ◽  
Vol 81 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon A. Christenson

In the merits phase of decision in the case brought by Nicaragua against the United States, the World Court briefly mentions references by states or publicists to the concept of jus cogens. These expressions are used to buttress the Court’s conclusion that the principle prohibiting the use of force found in Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter is also a rule of customary international law.


1986 ◽  
Vol 80 (3) ◽  
pp. 720-721
Author(s):  
T. M. F.

The United Nations Administrative Tribunal (UNAT) has elected Herbert Reis of the United States, a former Counselor at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, as its Second Vice-President for the coming year. Mr. Reis has served on the tribunal for 5 years. Samar Sen of India and Arnold Kean of the United Kingdom were elected President and First Vice-President of the tribunal, respectively.


Author(s):  
Henry Shue

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change adopted in Rio de Janeiro at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in June 1992 establishes no dates and no dollars. No dates are specified by which emissions are to be reduced by the wealthy states, and no dollars are specified with which the wealthy states will assist the poor states to avoid an environmentally dirty development like our own. The convention is toothless because throughout the negotiations in the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee during 1991 to 1992, the United States played the role of dentist: whenever virtually all the other states in the world (with the notable exceptions of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait) agreed to convention language with teeth, the United States insisted that the teeth be pulled out. The Clinton administration now faces a strategic question: should the next step aim at a comprehensive treaty covering all greenhouse gases (GHGs) or at a narrower protocol covering only one, or a few, gases, for example, only fossil-fuel carbon dioxide (CO2)? Richard Stewart and Jonathan Wiener (1992) have argued for moving directly to a comprehensive treaty, while Thomas Drennen (1993) has argued for a more focused beginning. I will suggest that Drennen is essentially correct that we should not try to go straight to a comprehensive treaty, at least not of the kind advocated by Stewart and Wiener. First I would like to develop a framework into which to set issues of equity or justice of the kind introduced by Drennen. It would be easier if we faced only one question about justice, but several questions are not only unavoidable individually but are entangled with one another. In addition, each question can be given not simply alternative answers but answers of different kinds. In spite of this multiplicity of possible answers to the multiplicity of inevitable and interconnected questions, I think we can lay out the issues fairly clearly and establish that commonsense principles converge to a remarkable extent upon what ought to be done, at least for the next decade or so.


Author(s):  
Martha Minow

Even before it was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, Brown v. Board of Education had a global profile. Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal in a work that the Carnegie Corporation commissioned in 1944 in search of an unbiased view of American race relations, supplied a searing indictment of America’s treatment of the “Negro,” and his work, An American Dilemma, became a key citation in the Court’s famous footnote eleven. Initially, President Dwight D. Eisenhower showed no sympathy for the school integration project and expressed suspicion that the United Nations and international economic and social rights activists were betraying socialist or even communist leanings in supporting the brief. But as the United States tried to position itself as a leader in human rights and supporter of the United Nations, the Cold War orientation of President Eisenhower’s Republican administration gave rise to interest in ending official segregation, lynchings, and cross burnings in order to elevate the American image internationally. The Department of Justice consulted with the State Department on the drafting of an amicus brief in Brown that argued that ending racially segregated schools would halt the Soviet critique of racial abuses tolerated by the U.S. system of government and thereby help combat global communism. Ending segregation emerged as part of a strategy to win more influence than the Soviet Union in the “Third World.” African-American civil rights leader and journalist Roger Wilkins later recalled that ending official segregation became urgent as black ambassadors started to visit Washington, D.C., and the United Nations in New York City. Tracking the influence of Brown in other countries is thornier than tracking its influence inside the United States where the topic has motivated a cottage industry in academic scholarship. As this book has considered, the litigation has by now a well-known and complicated relationship to actual racial integration within American schools. Some argue that the case exacerbated tensions and slowed gradual reform that was already under way.


Worldview ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 5-6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas M. Magstadt

Last fall the United States ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, attempted to draw worldwide attention to the “savagery” of Ethiopia's Marxist regime. “It is estimated that some 30,000 persons in Ethiopia were summarily executed for political reasons between 1974 and 1978,” she told the U.N. General Assembly on October 2, 1981. “Twelve-year-old children were among those immersed in hot oil. sexually tortured, or flung out of windows and left to die in the street.”At about the same time Ambassador Kirkpatrick was detailing the horrors of the Mengistu government, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service was busy preparing a review of the residency status of Ethiopians living in the United Stales.


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