This text is a revised edition and contains new material documenting the extensive and rapid innovations in the UN Security Council's procedures of the past two decades. It provides insight into the inside workings of the world's pre-eminent body for the maintenance of international peace and security. Grounded in the history and politics of the Council, it describes the ways the Council has responded through its working methods to a changing world. It explains the Council's role in its wider UN Charter context and examines its relations with other UN organs and its own subsidiary bodies.
This thoughtful work by the world's leading authority on the law of United Nations General Assembly Resolutions remains of inestimable value in its assessment of the potential role of these resolutions under the "New World Order." An insider familiar with the institution's complexities, Professor Sloan examines with insight and clarity the new opportunities available to the United Nations in a world released from the stifling restraints of the Cold War. The book includes detailed documentary annexes as well as a bibliography and index. Published under the Transnational Publishers imprint.
This is the first major exploration of the United Nations Security Council's part in addressing the problem of war, both civil and international, since 1945. Both during and after the Cold War the Council has acted in a limited and selective manner, and its work has sometimes resulted in failure. It has not been - and was never equipped to be - the centre of a comprehensive system of collective security. However, it remains the body charged with primary responsibility for international peace and security. It offers unique opportunities for international consultation and military collaboration, and for developing legal and normative frameworks. It has played a part in the reduction in the incidence of international war in the period since 1945. This study examines the extent to which the work of the UN Security Council, as it has evolved, has or has not replaced older systems of power politics and practices regarding the use of force. Its starting point is the failure to implement the UN Charter scheme of having combat forces under direct UN command. Instead, the Council has advanced the use of international peacekeeping forces; it has authorized coalitions of states to take military action; and it has developed some unanticipated roles such as the establishment of post-conflict transitional administrations, international criminal tribunals, and anti-terrorism committees. The book, bringing together distinguished scholars and practitioners, draws on the methods of the lawyer, the historian, the student of international relations, and the practitioner. It begins with an introductory overview of the Council's evolving roles and responsibilities. It then discusses specific thematic issues, and through a wide range of case studies examines the scope and limitations of the Council's involvement in war. It offers frank accounts of how belligerents viewed the UN, and how the Council acted and sometimes failed to act. The appendices provide comprehensive information - much of it not previously brought together in this form - of the extraordinary range of the Council's activities. This book is a project of the Oxford Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War.
This study provides a comprehensive analysis of the questions pertaining to the powers of the Security Council under Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations. In doing so it departs from the premise that an analysis of the limitations to the powers of the Security Council and an analysis of judicial review of such limitations by the ICJ, respectively, are inter-dependent. On the one hand, judicial review would only become relevant if and to the extent that the powers granted to the Security Council under Chapter VII of the Charter are subject to justiciable limitations. On the other hand, the relevance of any limitation to the powers of the Security Council would remain limited if it could not be enforced by judicial review. This inter-dependence is reflected by the fact that Chapters 2 and 3 focus on judicial review in advisory and contentious proceedings, respectively, whereas Chapters 4 to 9 examine the limits to the powers of the Security Council. The concluding chapter subsequently illuminates how the respective limits to the Security Council's enforcement powers could be enforced by judicial review. It also explores an alternative mode of review of binding Security Council decisions that could complement judicial review by the ICJ, notably the right of states to reject illegal Security Council decisions as a 'right of last resort'. The space and attention devoted to the limits to the Security Council's enforcement powers reflects the second aim of this study, namely to provide new direction to this aspect of the debate on the Security Council's powers under Chapter VII of the Charter. It does so by paying particular attention to the role of human rights norms in limiting the type of enforcement measures that the Security Council can resort to in order to maintain or restore international peace and security.
The reactivation of the Security Council at the beginning of the last decade has resulted, since the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq on August 2, l990, in increasing use of its powers under Chapter VII of the Charter and the adoption of measures against a number of state and non-state entities. The notion of a threat to the peace has now come to encompass violations of fundamental norms of international law such as human rights and humanitarian law, and the wide-ranging measures adopted have included such innovations as the establishment of the UN Compensation Commission or that of the two international criminal tribunals for Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. These measures have not only infringed on the legal rights of the targeted state (sometimes with irreversible effects where they have remained in force over a long period of time) and its population, but also on those of implementing states and of private rights within these states. The current debate over the legitimacy and long-term effects of economic sanctions on states and their populations makes it imperative to re-evaluate this instrument and the broader peace maintenance function of the Security Council in the light of current community concerns. Part One of this book addresses the theoretical issues by focussing on: 1) The place of sanctions in the international legal system; 2) the limits to the powers of the Security Council and the question of accountability; and 3) an assessment of the alternatives to collective economic sanctions. Part Two looks at the relationship between sanctions and humanitarian issues, examining the relationship between: 1) Sanctions and human rights law; 2) sanctions, humanitarian issues and mandates; and 3) sanctions and humanitarian law. Part Three focuses on implementation by states of Security Council sanctions resolutions by examining: 1) Sanctions and private rights; and 2) special problems for implementing states. Part Four addresses the future in reassessing the place and ethics of sanctions in an international legal system which is giving increased importance to the individual. This work is based on papers presented at a colloquium of the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva.
Since World War II, international organizations have adopted an ever-increasing number of resolutions in most fields of human endeavor. In spite of the growing importance of these resolutions in international life, there is uncertainty and often disagreement as to their nature and value. The purpose of this book is to define in so far as possible the legal effects of resolutions adopted by the United Nations.
