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UN: The End of Collective Action - Empire? - Global Policy Forum UN: The End of Collective Action
By Monique Chemellier-Gendreau
Le Monde Diplomatique
November 2001
The end of international law, likely since the Gulf war, is accelerating. After several years wavering between passivity and total submission to United States diktat, the UN Security Council finally bowed to the US in Resolution 1368 of 12 September 2001. Although its text seems purely declamatory, the resolution must be read in the light of the UN charter.
By describing the attacks of 11 September as "threats to international peace and security", the Security Council has adopted President George W Bush's confusion between those ideas. Without actually using the term "act of war", it is using its authority to get the attacks committed by private persons operating from American soil and using aircraft belonging to American airlines accepted as an international act.
It is above all claiming jurisdiction, since under Article 24 of the UN charter "its members confer on the Security Council primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security". And under Chapter VII, any action, especially military action, to that end must be ordered by the Security Council. Now that the Council has described recent events in that way, we might therefore expect it to assume that primary responsibility and decide which of the measures available it will use.
It has done that financially, where Resolution 1373 of 28 September, based on Chapter VII, introduces controls (difficult to enforce) on the financing of terrorism. But in the military realm its abdication is confirmed. It comes in one of the recitals to resolution 1368, which recognises "the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence in accordance with the charter", presenting it as legitimising military action by the US (1).
But the words "in accordance with the charter" give the lie to that analysis. While Article 51 recognises a country's right of individual and collective self-defence, that right is strictly limited in time. By requiring states to renounce the use of force, the charter breaks with a five centuries-old culture of unlimited sovereignty and the right to wage war. In exchange, if they are victims of aggression they are promised that the Security Council will provide collective security on their behalf.
The use of force is not abolished; but organising it collectively is an attempt to make it more objective and less deadly. While there is still a place for the right of self-defence (as viewed subjectively by the state that is under attack or believes itself to be), it may be exercised only for a very short space of time. While there is nothing in the charter to restrict that right if a country is attacked, that only applies "until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security". Retaliate, if you are able to do so, but only until the Security Council is ready to intervene.
Until 1989 the Security Council was paralysed by the use of the veto during the cold war; but since then it has constantly shirked its responsibilities. In the war against Iraq it delegated the right to conduct that war to the US-led coalition. That in itself was against the terms of the charter since Article 46 states that the Security Council is responsible for drawing up military plans and shares that responsibility only with the Military Staff Committee. In 1998, in Kosovo, it retrospectively gave UN legitimacy to the operations carried out by the US on behalf of Nato. Now self-defence is not just a temporary expedient pending Security Council action; while the Security Council may describe a situation as a threat to peace, it has abandoned any idea of collective action in the name of the UN.
By adopting the US's mistaken analysis, the UN is encouraging a vicious circle where the response to violence and murder is a war of vengeance that may be extended to other lands. The idea of breaking that circle using a form of collective security that includes food, health and environmental security for all will now have to be rediscovered.
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