Until What? Enforcement Action or Collective Self-Defense?

1991 ◽  
Vol 85 (3) ◽  
pp. 506-516 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eugene V. Rostow
Keyword(s):  
United Nations ◽  
Security Council ◽  
Gulf War ◽  
United Nations Security Council ◽  
Veto Power ◽  
Legal Issue ◽  
Enforcement Action ◽  
Self Defense ◽  
Collective Self ◽  
The United Nations

Should the Persian Gulf war of 1990-1991 be characterized as an “international enforcement action” of the United Nations Security Council or as a campaign of collective self-defense approved, encouraged, and blessed by the Security Council?This is not simply a nice and rather metaphysical legal issue, but an extremely practical one. The question it presents is whether the control and direction of hostilities in the gulf, their termination, and the substance of the settlement they produce were handled by the Council as the Korean War was handled, that is, as a campaign of collective self-defense, or as the United Nations’ first “international enforcement action.” According to some international lawyers, characterizing the gulf war as a Security Council “enforcement action” under the untried procedures of Articles 42-50 of the Charter would in effect eviscerate Article 51, make the exercise of each state’s “inherent” right of self-defense subject to the permission of the Security Council, threaten the veto power of the permanent members of the Security Council, and thus lead to extremely grave and perhaps insoluble political difficulty. It could even destroy the United Nations.

scholarly journals Pengapusan Hak Veto Dalam Rangka Reformasi Dewan Keamanan Perserikatan Bangsa-Bangsa

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 210-234
Author(s):  
Dewi Afrilianti ◽  
Budi Ardianto ◽  
Dony Yusra Pebrianto
Keyword(s):  
United Nations ◽  
Security Council ◽  
Research Method ◽  
The United States ◽  
United Nations Security Council ◽  
Veto Power ◽  
National Interests ◽  
Original Intent ◽  
Permanent Member ◽  
The United Nations

This study aims to find out what is the reason the veto is considered irrelevant to the Security Council in realizing world security and peace in connection with the plan of veto power in the framework of reform of the United Nations Security Council because the use of veto rights by the five permanent member states of the Security Council, especially the United States has been used with no limits. The research method used is normative type with statutory, conceptual, and case approach. The results of this study show that the security council's veto power in practice has deviated from its original intent. The reform efforts of the United Nations Security Council have many obstacles but the main obstacles that greatly hinder the reform efforts are the arrogant, selfish, and willless nature of the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council who are veto holders to continue to maintain their hegemony and national interests. Keywords:  United Nations; Right; Veto;

scholarly journals Responsible Veto Restraint: a Transitional Cosmopolitan Reform Measure for the Responsibility to Protect

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 385-414
Author(s):  
Richard Illingworth
Keyword(s):  
United Nations ◽  
Security Council ◽  
Code Of Conduct ◽  
United Nations Security Council ◽  
Responsibility To Protect ◽  
Veto Power ◽  
Reform Measure ◽  
Mass Atrocity ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
Atrocity Crimes

Abstract This article examines reform to the ‘veto’ power held by the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. The responsibility to react to mass atrocity crimes under the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) lies predominantly in the hands of the Security Council, meaning that R2P and the veto are inseparable. Veto use can obstruct the Council from meeting its R2P, reflected by the ongoing crisis in Syria, over which 16 Council draft resolutions have been vetoed to date. This article applies a transitional cosmopolitan framework to offer an informal ‘Responsible Veto Restraint’ (rvr) recommendation for veto reform. This measure provides a more effective and feasible avenue for veto reform than the recommendations of the Accountability, Coherency, and Transparency Group’s Code of Conduct and the France-Mexico Joint initiative for veto restraint. rvr can help promote R2P action through the Security Council, offering an avenue for progress towards addressing the problem of atrocity crimes.

scholarly journals The Evolving Role of ECOWAS and the SADC in Peace Operations: A Challenge to the Primacy of the United Nations Security Council in Matters of Peace and Security?

2013 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 353-369 ◽  
Author(s):  
ERIKA DE WET
Keyword(s):  
United Nations ◽  
Security Council ◽  
United Nations Security Council ◽  
Peace Operations ◽  
Military Operations ◽  
Constitutional Treaty ◽  
Regional Organizations ◽  
Enforcement Action ◽  
Peace And Security ◽  
The United Nations

AbstractThis article examines the evolution of military operations by the Economic Community of Western African States (ECOWAS) and the South African Development Community (SADC) over the last three decades. By looking at constitutional (treaty) developments and organizational practice, it questions whether these sub-regional organizations have displaced the primacy of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) in matters pertaining to international peace and security, as foreseen in Articles 24(1) and 103 of the United Nations Charter (the UN Charter). The relevance of this question is underscored by the fact that ECOWAS and SADC have engaged in various peace operations since the 1990s. The article concludes that, since all the interventions under discussion were underpinned by the consent of the recognized government, it would be premature to suggest that the practice of African sub-regional organizations amounts to the emergence of a new customary right to engage in ‘first-instance enforcement action’.

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.

The UN Secretary-General and the Security Council

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United Nations ◽  
Security Council ◽  
United Nations Security Council ◽  
Secretary General ◽  
Organizational Relationships ◽  
Dynamic Relationship ◽  
International Mediation ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
The Relationship

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.

scholarly journals International Law, COVID-19 and Feminist Engagement with the United Nations Security Council: The End of the Affair?

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 321-328
Author(s):  
Catherine O’Rourke
Keyword(s):  
United Nations ◽  
International Law ◽  
Security Council ◽  
United Nations Security Council ◽  
Care Work ◽  
Gender Based Violence ◽  
Seminal Contribution ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
Gender Based

AbstractThe gendered implications of COVID-19, in particular in terms of gender-based violence and the gendered division of care work, have secured some prominence, and ignited discussion about prospects for a ‘feminist recovery’. In international law terms, feminist calls for a response to the pandemic have privileged the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), conditioned—I argue—by two decades of the pursuit of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda through the UNSC. The deficiencies of the UNSC response, as characterised by the Resolution 2532 adopted to address the pandemic, manifest yet again the identified deficiencies of the WPS agenda at the UNSC, namely fragmentation, securitisation, efficacy and legitimacy. What Resolution 2532 does bring, however, is new clarity about the underlying reasons for the repeated and enduring nature of these deficiencies at the UNSC. Specifically, the COVID-19 ‘crisis’ is powerful in exposing the deficiencies of the crisis framework in which the UNSC operates. My reflections draw on insights from Hilary Charlesworth’s seminal contribution ‘International Law: A Discipline of Crisis’ to argue that, instead of conceding the ‘crisis’ framework to the pandemic by prioritising the UNSC, a ‘feminist recovery’ must instead follow Charlesworth’s exhortation to refocus on an international law of the everyday.

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