The Crime of Aggression as Custom and the Mechanisms for Determining Acts of Aggression

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.


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.


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.


2007 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-48
Author(s):  
Richard Falk

This essay examines the consequences of the near-canonical status acquired over the years by UN Security Council Resolution 242. After tracing the evolution of the vision of peace seen to flow from 242, the essay explores the various ways in which the resolution has been read. In particular, the interpretation of Israel (backed by the United States) is examined, along with the balance of power factor. The essay concludes by suggesting that clinging to 242 as ““canonical”” inhibits clear-sighted thinking on new approaches that take cognizance of the greatly altered circumstances.


2011 ◽  
Vol 6 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 335-349
Author(s):  
David Bosco

Less has changed in US diplomacy at the United Nations than many observers expected when the Obama administration took office in January 2009. In the UN Security Council, the United States has pursued a generally steady course that in many respects builds on the accomplishments of the Bush administration. Unexpectedly, the Security Council’s pace of work diminished considerably during the first few years of the new administration. The most significant change is the atmospherics of US diplomacy, not its substance: the Obama administration has participated in processes that the Bush administration shunned and has toned down US criticism of the United Nations’ perceived shortcomings.


Significance The United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia and China are the body’s five permanent members. India wants to join that group. Impacts India-China border tensions could surge in early 2021, worsening bilateral relations. Delhi will deepen security ties with Washington and its other partners in the ‘Quad’ grouping, Tokyo and Canberra. India will push for more stringent selection of UN peacekeepers.


2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 702-714 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jelena Cupać ◽  
Irem Ebetürk

Antifeminist mobilisation is growing in the United Nations. It is led by a coalition of certain post-Soviet, Catholic, and Islamic states; the United States; the Vatican; conservative nongovernmental organisations, occasionally joined by the Organisation for Islamic Cooperation, the League of Arab States, the UN Africa Group, and the G77. Uniting them is the aim of restoring the ‘natural family’ and opposing ‘gender ideology’. The group has become increasingly strategic, and its impact can already be seen in a number of UN fora, including the Security Council. By surveying feminist notions of backlash and comparing them to Alter and Zürn’s definition of ‘backlash politics’, the article gauges whether the group’s activities can be characterised as such politics. The conclusion is that they can, suggesting that we are looking at a group with the potential to alter not only the global course of women’s rights but also how politics is done within the UN.


2020 ◽  
pp. 54-99
Author(s):  
Francine R. Frankel

India’s suspicion of US motives set in during the first India-Pakistan war over Kashmir in 1950, after the Hindu maharaja of Muslim majority Kashmir acceded to India. Great Britain, considering that Kashmir should join Muslim-majority Pakistan and that India-Pakistan cooperation was essential to Commonwealth defense, feared India could exercise its legal right to self-defense after tribesmen aided by Pakistan invaded across the northern border. Foreign Office records reveal how the British acted behind the scenes in the UN Security Council to block a discussion of India’s request to remove the tribesmen from Azad Kashmir as the condition for holding a plebiscite. The United States, influenced by the British, appeared to Nehru as the power behind the hostility toward India, while seeking a Cold War bastion in Kashmir.


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