Governing Proliferation Finance

Author(s):  
Grégoire Mallard

As the critical sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program demonstrate, the implementation of sanctions against nuclear proliferators has led to the creation of a global system of surveillance of the financial dealings of all states, banks, and individuals, fostered by United Nations Security Council resolutions—a new and unprecedented development. This chapter asks: Which actors have been in charge of designing and implementing sanctions against nuclear proliferators? Which legal technologies have they developed to regulate global financial transactions? Answering these questions generates a better understanding of key processes in global governance: the increasing role of the Security Council as a global legislator; the “financialization” of global regulation, with the increasing role played by international and US domestic financial institutions that were historically foreign to the field of nuclear nonproliferation; and the judicialization of the enforcement of sanctions, which is accompanied by the multiplication of secondary sanctions against sanctions-evaders.

Author(s):  
Luis Cabrera

While there have been numerous recent analyses of the legitimacy of suprastate governance institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) or United Nations Security Council, few accounts have considered individual duties in relation to those institutions, broadly analogous to suprastate political obligation. Identified in this chapter are three categories of duties that should be salient to a range of institutions. These include duties to support their reform, to resist specific institutional features or practices, and to reject the continued operation of some institutions and support the creation of alternate ones. These duties would correspond roughly to how well an institution would appear to fit into a global institutional scheme that actually would fulfill cosmopolitan aims for rights promotion and protections and related global moral goods. An implication is that the current global system itself is a candidate for rejection, given its inherent tendencies toward the gross underfulfillment of individual rights.


The United Nations Secretary-General and the United Nations Security Council spend significant amounts of time on their relationship with each other. They rely on each other for such important activities as peacekeeping, international mediation, and the formulation and application of normative standards in defense of international peace and security—in other words, the executive aspects of the UN’s work. The edited book The UN Secretary-General and the Security Council: A Dynamic Relationship aims to fill an important lacuna in the scholarship on the UN system. Although there exists an impressive body of literature on the development and significance of the Secretariat and the Security Council as separate organs, an important gap remains in our understanding of the interactions between them. Bringing together some of the most prominent authorities on the subject, this volume is the first book-length treatment of this topic. It studies the UN from an innovative angle, creating new insights on the (autonomous) policy-making of international organizations and adding to our understanding of the dynamics of intra-organizational relationships. Within the book, the contributors examine how each Secretary-General interacted with the Security Council, touching upon such issues as the role of personality, the formal and informal infrastructure of the relationship, the selection and appointment processes, as well as the Secretary-General’s threefold role as a crisis manager, administrative manager, and manager of ideas.


2016 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-195
Author(s):  
Michael D. Rosenthal

For many years, the United Nations Security Council expressed its concerns about the proliferation risks presented by the Iranian nuclear program, doing so in the context of its primary responsibility under the Charter of the United Nations for the maintenance of international peace and security. With the intent to resolve its concerns, the Security Council adopted Resolution 2231 on July 20, 2015. The Resolution endorsed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that had been concluded on July 14, 2015, by China, France, Germany, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, the United States, the European Union, and Iran (the E3/EU + 3). Resolution 2231 and the JCPOA are closely intertwined. Their implementation will result in strict limits on Iran’s ability to produce weapongrade nuclear material. On-site verification and monitoring of these limits by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will provide assurance that Iran is observing them. Resolution 2231 and the JCPOA also provide for a step-by-step removal of sanctions imposed on Iran for its past failure to resolve concerns about its nuclear program. Past concerns about “possible military dimensions” to Iran’s nuclear program, while neither misplaced nor necessarily fully assuaged, were put aside, being outweighed by the prospect that the JCPOA offers, “a comprehensive, long-term and proper solution to the Iranian nuclear issue.”


2003 ◽  
Vol 97 (3) ◽  
pp. 590-598 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Falk

President George W. Bush historically challenged the United Nations Security Council when he uttered some memorable words in the course of his September 12, 2002, speech to the General Assembly: “Will the UN serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?” In the aftermath of the Iraq war there are at least two answers to this question. The answer of the U.S. government would be to suggest that the United Nations turned out to be irrelevant due to its failure to endorse recourse to war against the Iraq of Saddam Hussein. The answer of those who opposed the war is that the UN Security Council served the purpose of its founding by its refusal to endorse recourse to a war that could not be persuasively reconciled with the UN Charter and international law. This difference of assessment is not just factual, whether Iraq was a threat and whether the inspection process was succeeding at a reasonable pace; it was also conceptual, even jurisprudential. The resolution of this latter debate is likely to shape the future role of the United Nations, as well as influence the attitude of the most powerful sovereign state as to the relationship between international law generally and the use of force as an instrument of foreign policy.


2018 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Virgílio Caixeta Arraes

The article deals with the final phase of Lula da Silva’s foreign policy toward the United States (2009-2010). The topics dealt with are Dilma Rousseff’s candidacy to the Brazilian presidency; the Brazilian borders considering US presence in Colombia; Brazil’s permanent membership to the United Nations Security Council; hosting of international sporting events under the auspices of ‘playful diplomacy’; attempt to reach a diplomatic understanding of Iran’s nuclear program and Haiti’s earthquake.


Author(s):  
Nathalie Weizmann

Abstract United Nations, regional and domestic counterterrorism measures have generated a cascade of adverse effects for impartial humanitarian activities in areas where designated groups are present. Certain humanitarian activities, diverted supplies and incidental payments can fall foul of broadly worded counterterrorism regulation proscribing or criminalizing financial and other support to designated groups. Donors to humanitarian organizations set strict conditions and financial institutions decline transactions, hampering impartial humanitarian activities in the very instances in which international humanitarian law (IHL) requires that they be allowed. Recognizing this, United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions 2462 and 2482 adopted in 2019 have spelled out more explicitly than ever before the need for counterterrorism measures to comply with IHL and safeguard impartial humanitarian action in line with IHL. This article sets out those IHL obligations that govern humanitarian and medical activities and the types of safeguards that States have put in place to ensure their counterterrorism measures comply with IHL and allow for these activities. The UNSC's latest steer in resolutions 2462 and 2482 provides a foundation for States’ exclusion of impartial humanitarian and medical activities from the scope of application of their counterterrorism measures. This can be an effective way of averting adverse consequences for these activities where designated entities are present.


AJIL Unbound ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 110 ◽  
pp. 13-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joy Gordon

Devika Hovell raises deeply significant questions about the role of due process in the legitimacy of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). Hovell gives us a fine-grained analysis of what exactly makes due process so compelling; in her approach, the reasons why it is compelling will vary in different contexts, depending upon the particular value and function it serves. In particular, she discusses three ways of articulating the values underlying due process, and the models of due process that would follow from each. She then discusses how her analysis would play out in two situations: The Council’s use of asset freezes, and the role of the UN in the cholera epidemic in Haiti. In her case studies, she looks at situations where due process has been insufficient, and discusses some of the UN’s attempts to remedy this, and the organizational difficulties in doing so.


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