scholarly journals PALESTINE, INTERNATIONAL LAW AND MUSLIM UNITY

2012 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad Naqib Ishan Jan
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Security Council ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Legal Issue ◽  
Un Security Council ◽  
The Will ◽  
Lack Of Commitment ◽  
Executive Organ ◽  
Rights Issue ◽  
State Of Israel

The Palestine issue is a heart breaking politico-legal issue that has remained unresolved for so long. The issue started immediately after the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and following the occupation of Palestine by Great Britain. Britain disregarded the will of the majority of population, facilitated, directly or indirectly, Jewish settlements and supported foreign- led Zionist movement by making an unjust and illegal promise to them to create a state for Jews in Palestine which it eventually did and in doing so it further complicated the Palestine issue – an issue which the League of Nations was unable to solve due to its lack of commitment and its weak organizational structure. The issue has continued till today and is termed as “the most serious and prolonged unresolved political and human rights issue on the agenda of the United Nations (UN) since its inception.” The inability of the UN to resolve the Palestine issue is not due to the fault of international law but due to the lack of commitment of some of the powerful members of its executive organ, that is the Security Council. These powers disgracefully have shown passivity and apparent indifference about the long and cruel Israeli occupation of Palestine. As this paper explains, the indifference on the part of the UN Security Council has enabled the Zionist state of Israel to pursue with impunity its aggressive wars, its ethnic cleaning strategy, its settlements policy, its blockades of the Palestinian cities and towns and its denial of the Palestinians’ inalienable right of self determination. If the powerful nations of the world failed Palestine and its people, we the Muslims must not follow suit. We must stop our infighting and unite our strength and do everything that is peacefully possible to help Palestinians to find a just solution to their problem and if possible to restore Palestine to its historical status.

scholarly journals The Effectiveness of Economic Sanctions Implementation Against the Apartheid Regime in South Africa

2020 ◽  
pp. 48-58
Author(s):  
Gevorg Grigoryan
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
International Law ◽  
South African ◽  
Security Council ◽  
Economic Sanctions ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
South African Society ◽  
Land Grab ◽  
Un Security Council ◽  
Apartheid Regime

The article covers history and practice of the development of economic sanctions as a mechanism of influence on countries that do not comply with the norms of international law. The objectives of the sanctions may include preventing wars, promoting freedom and democracy, combating environmental pollution, protecting human and labor rights, ensuring non-proliferation of weapons, releasing captured citizens, and countering land grab. Everything connected with sanctions (e.g. size, form, etc.) is determined by their acceptability by the community, and they are influenced by technology and the existing relations of power between social groups within countries. However, unlike well-defined rules concerning declared war and blockade of wartime, international law doesn’t establish any legal or formal restrictions on coercive measures with the exception of war. The first written economic sanctions were imposed in 432 BC by the Athens Maritime Union on the city of Megara. Sanctions were aimed at stopping the Megara’s practice of accepting runaway Athenian slaves and plowing sacred border territories. Sanctions were ineffective, due to which the Peloponnesian War began. Athens suffered a crushing defeat, and the Athenian union was destroyed. In the 19th century sanctions generally took the form of sea blockades. The question of the international legitimacy of sea blockades did not arise until the formation of the League of Nations in the 20th century. Article 16 of the Charter of the League of Nations allowed collective economic and military action against a state that turned to war in disregard of the League Agreement, which required states to settle disputes peacefully. In the Charter of the United Nations, the right to apply sanctions is enshrined in Articles 2 (4), 39, 41, 42, 43 and 46 of the Charter of this organization and in the “Unification for Peace resolution” 1950. In the period between 1946 and 1990 the UN imposed sanctions on North Korea, South Africa, Portugal, Rhodesia and Iraq. In the subsequent period, the UN began to apply sanctions more actively, especially against African states. Effectiveness of the implemented economic sanctions in most cases was dubious, since the desired results were not achieved or at least deviated from the initial purpose. After the massacre in Sharpeville, where civilians who protested against the apartheid became victims of inhuman police crimes, the problem of South African racist politics became a hot topic on the world agenda. Some countries led by India in the following years began to actively raise this issue with the UN Security Council. Western countries did their best to prevent the use of sanctions against South Africa, because of the country’s important role for NATO in advancing its strategic goals. After the Soweto Uprising, on November 4, 1977, when the photographs of young people killed by the police appeared in major newspapers worldwide, the UN Security Council finally adopted mandatory sanction measures. Nevertheless, governments of some of the Western powers sought to maintain their traditional tolerance for the apartheid regime, counting on South Africa to counter the Soviet-Cuban intervention in the civil wars of Angola and Mozambique. Since 1977 till 1994 The UN Security Council had repeatedly demanded that all states comply with the sanctions restrictions, which throughout this time gradually tightened and comprehensively affected all spheres of life of the South African society.

Revisiting Security Council action on terrorism: New threats; (a lot of) new law; same old problems?

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
David McKeever
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Security Council ◽  
Counter Terrorism ◽  
Un Security Council ◽  
New Type ◽  
Recent Activity ◽  
Legislative Activity ◽  
Recent Action ◽  
Organizing Principles ◽  
Law Making

Abstract The devastating events of 9/11 triggered the adoption of Resolution 1373 (2001) by the UN Security Council, a contentious development which was much debated and was widely seen as presaging a new type of activity by the Security Council – legislating for all UN member states. And yet, in the counter-terrorism sphere at least, the Council’s legislative activity in the years following 9/11 was relatively modest. Both quantitatively and qualitatively, that activity has been far exceeded by the Council’s response to the emergence of ISIL in 2014. This more recent activity is of interest beyond the confines of counter-terrorism, but has received far less scrutiny to date. This article will remedy this gap, revisiting, in light of the recent activity, the relative merits and disadvantages of making counter-terrorism law through Security Council resolutions. It makes two main contentions. The first is that – due to some factors which were anticipated in the early 2000s and many which were not – Security Council resolutions on terrorism constitute a distinctive category of international law-making and pose serious challenges for the application of organizing principles and processes of general international law. The second is that, for these reasons as well as doubts as to the necessity and efficacy of recent action, making counter-terrorism law through Security Council resolutions should be the exception rather than the norm.

Historical Landmarks in the Hundred Years’ War on Palestine

2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rashid I. Khalidi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Security Council ◽  
The United States ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
Hundred Years War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Un Security Council ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Era

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.

scholarly journals The destruction of SFRY and Serbia

Napredak ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 15-20
Author(s):  
Vladislav Jovanović
Keyword(s):  
Security Council ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
National Minority ◽  
The West ◽  
Un Security Council ◽  
Key Factor ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Will ◽  
Autonomous Province ◽  
Terrorist Acts

The paper recapitulates the process of the destruction of the Yugoslav state (SFRY and FRY). Special attention is given to the key factor in that process, the will of the West, embodied in the USA and the EC (EU), for whom the continued existence of Yugoslavia was no longer of geopolitical interest. The conferences on Yugoslavia, organized in Brussels and The Hague, were supposed to serve to legitimize this goal: the disappearance of Yugoslavia. The author points out that when the West did not manage to achieve its goal with political solutions, it involved NATO, through the aggression in 1999. Previously, Serbia's legitimate opposition to terrorist acts by the KLA on its territory, as an internal issue par excellence, was declared a threat to "peace and security in the world", and the UN Security Council took it as a permanent topic of its sessions. There had been secessionist uprisings and armed conflicts in UN member states before, as there are today, but the Security Council never before dared to violate the article of the UN Charter that states that these questions are the exclusive competence of the member state concerned. An exception was made only in the case of Serbia, although the defense against KLA terrorism was legal and limited to the territory of the Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija, i.e., the Yugoslav state border was never crossed. The false claim of William Walker, the head of the OSCE mission in Kosovo and Metohija, concerning the massacre in Racak, was the cause of the war of aggression against the FRY. By illegally naming the protectorate of Kosovo as the so-called state of the Albanian national minority, the West took this as the final stroke in the dismemberment of Yugoslavia and Serbia, thus ignoring the story of the phoenix rising from its ashes.

Mosul Four and Iran Six

2018 ◽  
pp. 284-293
Author(s):  
Alex Mills
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
International Law ◽  
Security Council ◽  
Private International Law ◽  
Commercial Aircraft ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
State Immunity ◽  
House Of Lords ◽  
Un Security Council ◽  
History Of

This chapter explores the practical entanglement of questions of public and private international law through an examination of the history of ten commercial aircraft belonging to Kuwait Airways Corporation. The aircraft were seized by Iraq after the unlawful 1990 invasion of Kuwait, flown to Baghdad, and handed over to Iraqi Airways. Proceedings seeking return of the aircraft and damages were commenced by Kuwait Airways against Iraqi Airways in the English courts, a further saga which led to more than thirty reported cases, including a remarkable five decisions of the House of Lords. The dispute raised a range of issues, including questions of jurisdiction, state immunity, and perhaps most significantly the potential for public international law to be given effect through domestic private law proceedings, in this case as a source of public policy denying effect to acts of Iraqi law which were contrary to UN Security Council resolutions.

Adoption of 1325 Resolution

2018 ◽  
pp. 25-37
Author(s):  
Christine Chinkin
Keyword(s):  
National Security ◽  
International Law ◽  
Security Council ◽  
Terrorist Attacks ◽  
International Peace ◽  
Real Possibility ◽  
Policy Initiatives ◽  
Un Security Council ◽  
Peace And Security ◽  
Oriented Approach

UN Security Council Resolution 1325 was not adopted in a vacuum, but rather can be read with a number of other programs within the Security Council (SC) and UN architecture. These include other thematic resolutions, as well as broader policy initiatives. Taken together, these diverse strands sought to shift the understanding of the SC’s role in the maintenance of international peace and security, away from a classic state-oriented approach to one that places people at its center. The adoption of Resolution 1325, along with these other developments, had implications for the making of international law (the place of civil society and experts within the international legal and institutional framework), for rethinking participation, and the meaning of security/protection. This chapter suggests that 2000 was a pivotal moment when a more human-oriented international law seemed a real possibility and before the turn back toward militarism and national security in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Part 3 The Post 9/11-Era (2001–), 48 The Intervention in Afghanistan—2001–

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Byers Michael
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Security Council ◽  
Customary International Law ◽  
The Us ◽  
Un Security Council ◽  
State Actors ◽  
Complex Relationships ◽  
Self Defence

This chapter addresses the US and NATO-led intervention in Afghanistan from 2001 to the present day. It examines the different legal justifications advanced or available for the intervention, namely self-defence, UN Security Council authorization, and intervention by invitation. It explores the complex relationships between these justifications and, particularly, the strategies adopted by states in choosing between them. The chapter concludes by considering the effects of the intervention on the customary international law of self-defence as it concerns non-state actors located in “unaware or unable” states, and anticipatory or pre-emptive responses.

Intervention by Invitation

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory H. Fox
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
International Law ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Security Council ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
Democratic Legitimacy ◽  
Un Security Council ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Government ◽  
Internal Armed Conflicts

This chapter examines the debate concerning a state’s intervention in internal armed conflicts based on invitation, either from the government or from a rebel group fighting against the government. It looks at the issues that arise from intervention by invitation, particularly those relating to the territorial integrity of the state, the status of the actors involved, the nature of the consent, and implications for international law in general and for politics and human rights in particular. The chapter first considers the traditional view of intervention by invitation and the recent challenges to that view. It then discusses the negative equality principle as it applies to intervention in civil wars, as well as the link between intervention by invitation and democratic legitimacy. It also analyses the position of the UN Security Council on intervention by invitation.

Mandated to Protect

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haidi Willmot ◽  
Ralph Mamiya
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Security Council ◽  
Use Of Force ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Human Rights Law ◽  
Peacekeeping Operations ◽  
Un Peacekeeping ◽  
Un Security Council ◽  
Republic Of The Congo ◽  
Peacekeeping Missions

This chapter focuses on the conception and evolution of the UN Security Council mandate to protect civilians during peacekeeping operations from 1960 to the present. The chapter examines the normative and legal framework of the use of force to protect civilians in UN peacekeeping operations, with reference to Security Council resolutions and other bodies of international law such as humanitarian and human rights law. It considers Security Council practice between 1960 and 1999 and its emphasis on the concept of self-defence; Security Council practice from 1999 to 2007 regarding the inception and development of the explicit ‘protection of civilians’ mandate by the Council; Security Council practice from 2007 to 2011; and prioritization of the mandate in certain peacekeeping missions, specifically UNAMID (Sudan (Darfur)), MONUC (Democratic Republic of the Congo), UNOCI (Côte d’Ivoire), and UNMISS (South Sudan). Finally, the chapter describes Security Council practice from 2011 onwards and draws conclusions on impact that the protection of civilians mandate in peacekeeping operations has had on the evolution of the legitimate use of force under the UN Charter.

Terrorism

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Saul
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Security Council ◽  
Use Of Force ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
International Human Rights Law ◽  
International Consensus ◽  
Counter Terrorism ◽  
Un Security Council ◽  
Per Se ◽  
The Law

International law has struggled to regulate terrorism for over a century, beginning with efforts to cooperate in the extradition and prosecution of suspects, including through unsuccessful League of Nations efforts to define and criminalize terrorism as such. Until 2001 most international attention focused on transnational criminal cooperation against terrorism, through the development of method-specific “prosecute or extradite” treaties (concerning, for instance, violence against aircraft or ships, hostage taking, or attacks on diplomats) but without defining terrorism as a general concept or crime. It may, however, be possible to qualify some terrorist acts as war crimes or crimes against humanity. Since the 1970s, there were ambivalent efforts through the UN General Assembly to develop normative frameworks to confront terrorism per se, which often came unstuck on the controversial issues of “state terrorism” and liberation movement violence. Greater consensus was achieved by 1994 with the General Assembly’s adoption of a declaration against terrorism. There appears to exist an international consensus that terrorism per se is wrongful, even if disagreement remains about identifying precisely what constitutes terrorism. The effort to deal with terrorism as such suggests that the international community views terrorism as more than its underlying physical parts, which are already crimes in most national legal systems and under certain transnational treaties. The special wrongfulness of terrorism is perhaps signified by its intimidation of civilian populations, its coercion of governments or international organizations, and its political, religious, or ideological aspect. Terrorist violence has also sometimes raised certain problems under the law of armed conflict and the law on the use of force, as well as occasionally attracted sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council. Terrorism was generally dealt with, however, through the application of general legal norms rather than through the emergence of terrorism-specific rules. After the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, sharper international focus was brought to bear on the legal challenges presented by terrorism and counter-terrorism in numerous specialized branches of international law (particularly in the law of state responsibility, the law on the use of force, and international humanitarian law), as well as in the institutional practices of the UN Security Council and the impacts of counter-terrorism measures on international human rights law. By 2011 the UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon even declared the existence of an international customary law crime of transnational terrorism, although that decision has proven highly controversial as not supported by state practice. Efforts to negotiate a comprehensive international convention against terrorism have continued since 2000, with disagreement remaining over the scope of exceptions. There is also now increasing debate about whether a field of international anti-terrorism law is emerging.

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