Summary: The material below is liberally extracted from an Economist report (11/18/2004) on the "health" and future of the UN. If the UN will become more than a debating society it must have effective means for preventing and curtailing international and intranational warfare: its beginnings, ends, and the carnage in between.
Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the UN will soon receive a report from a high level panel on collective security. That panel's work, over the last year, has resulted in a blueprint for the reconfiguration of the UN's relation to the making of war.
Note, in particular, that
- It's responses to what have been called preventative wars between nations may become more effective because prescribed conditions and responses are more realistic
- It's prescriptions for military intrusion into intra-national affairs would now occur in any of the classic, historic or present- day instances of obvious genocide.
The United Nations and the rule of international law are incrisis. Their relevance is being questioned as never before. The criticism reached such a pitch after last year's Iraq war thatmany wondered whether a body increasingly seen as ineffective andanachronistic could, or indeed should, survive.Rarely have such dire forecasts been made about the UN, its secretary-general, Kofi Annan, said in his annual report to the General Assembly last year.We have reached a fork in the road...a moment no less decisive than 1945 itself, when the UNwas founded. On December 1st, he will receive a report by a high-level panel on collective security in the face of the newglobal threats. It is a report that may help in deciding theorganisation's fate.
The UN was set up to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war. It has not been very successful. Countries have repeatedly taken up arms against one another with impunity (as many as 680 times between 1945 and 1989, according to one count). Hundreds more conflicts have taken place within states.
No universally accepted practice currently governs the use of military force, says Gareth Evans, a former Australian foreign minister who heads the International Crisis Group and is one of the leading lights on the panel, States are going to war when they should not be, and not taking military action when they should. We have something approaching a crisis of confidence in the reality and relevance of the global legal order.
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Ever since the UN's creation, there have been mutterings about the need for reform. But, despite huge upheavals in the world, little has altered. Many began to wonder whether the ageing, unwieldy body was even capable of change. The Iraq war has acted as a catalyst, bringing the organisation's inadequacies into starker relief than ever before. More than a dozen Security Council resolutions were passed against Saddam Hussein in as many years, yet not one of them was fully enforced. When America asked the Security Council for authorisation to attack a country by which it considered itself threatened, it found its way blocked. So it acted on its own with a coalition of the willing.
This, Mr Annan recently declared, was illegal in so far as it was not in conformity with the UN Charter. Most international lawyers agree. Not surprisingly, America, and its chief ally, Britain, do not. But whatever the legal rights and wrongs of the invasion, the danger of states taking the law into their own hands, discounting the legitimacy of the UN, is evident. Such action, Mr Annan told the General Assembly last year, could set precedents that result in a proliferation of the unilateral and lawless use of force, with or without credible justification. So what to do about it?
Stock responses of containment and deterrence are no longer sufficient in the face of the new global threats of international terrorism, perhaps armed with weapons of mass destruction. It was not enough, Mr Annan conceded, to denounce unilateralism, unless the world also faced up squarely to the concerns that make some states feel vulnerable, and thus driven to take unilateral action. The UN must show that those concerns could, and would, be addressed effectively through collective action, he said. This is now the biggest challenge facing the UN.
It was also the main task that Mr Annan set his wise men. Judging by what has been leaked about the report, they have succeeded, against expectation, in agreeing on a new set of basic ground rules that lay down when the UN should resort to force. In an article entitled When is it right to fight? in the current issue of Survival, a quarterly journal of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Mr Evans sets out ideas that are understood largely to reflect the panel's own thinking.
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The panel [it seems, will] propose the adoption of five basic criteria of legitimacyas guidelines for the use of force in all cases[~]whether self-defence, external armed conflict or internal crises that involve gross violations of human rights. The five are: the seriousness of the threat (is it sufficiently clear and serious to warrant military force?); proper purpose (the prime intention must be to halt or avert the threat, whatever other motives are involved); last resort (has every non-military option for meeting the threat been considered?); proportional means (the scale, duration and intensity of the proposed military action must be the minimum necessary); and the balance of consequences (there must be reasonable prospects of success; force cannot be justified if it is likely to make matters worse).
Under the charter, the use of force is permitted in just two cases. First, under Article 51, in self-defence [base "]if an attack occurs[per thou] (a phrase inserted at American insistence). Second, under Chapter VII, if authorised by the Security Council in the event of a breach of, or threat to, world peace. Under customary international law, a pre-emptive strike in self-defence has also long been permitted where an attack is [base "]imminent[per thou]. No one has ever seriously suggested that you have to wait to be fired upon.
But a preventive (as opposed to pre-emptive) strike in self-defence[~]one designed to head off a more distant suspected threat[~]is not permitted under Article 51. This requires a Chapter VII authorisation by the Security Council. Yet in a world of lethal weapons, where annihilation could come without warning at a press of a nuclear button, it is unreasonable to expect a country to wait until an attack is imminent. By then, it would already be too late, the panel concedes.
Nevertheless, it firmly rejects any expansion of the scope of self-defence under Article 51. Instead, it urges the Security Council to consider the early authorisation of action against certain types of urgent but non-imminent threats, such as terrorist groups that are about to acquire weapons of mass destruction. This is something that Mr Annan has already suggested. Once the council has determined the existence of a threat to peace, even if it is quite a distant one, it then has virtual carte blanche to call for measures [base "]to maintain or restore international peace and security[per thou].
If it decides that an internal conflict amounts to a threat to international peace, it can also authorise armed [base "]humanitarian[per thou] intervention[~]as it did in Somalia and later in Bosnia in the early 1990s. But the council is often painfully slow to respond, if it responds at all. Witness the current and continuing slaughter in Darfur.
Three years ago Mr Evans co-chaired a committee set up by Mr Annan to study the competing claims of state sovereignty and individual rights. It recommended a new responsibility to protect, ie, that the international community (read the UN) had not simply a right, but a responsibility to act to protect the people of a country when that country itself abdicated responsibility. This idea had begun quietly to gain momentum, Mr Evans says, when it was thrown off course by one of the ex post facto justifications for the Iraq war: that the invasion was necessary on humanitarian grounds. The panel would now like the principle to be formally adopted.
The wise men regard their success in winning unanimous agreement on a definition of [base "]terrorism[per thou] as one of their greatest achievements. Hitherto, attempts to find an acceptable definition have always foundered on the insistence of the Organisation of Islamic Conferences and its 56 member states that it exclude [base "]armed struggle for liberation and self-determination[per thou]. Now even Amre Moussa, the only Arab member of the panel, has accepted that any politically motivated violence against innocent civilians should be regarded as terrorism, and condemned.
As a sweetener for Mr Moussa, the group agreed to include a recommendation that all states be held more rigorously to their obligations under international law, including the rules governing occupation. This is an evident dig at Israel's conduct in the Palestinian occupied territories, as well as at America's actions in Iraq.
