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IRAQ: NGOs Urge States to Use U.N. Charter to Prevent Attack

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 18 2003 (IPS) - Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) condemned the U.S. decision to abandon multilateral diplomacy in favour of a unilateral military attack against Iraq on Tuesday, with some calling for an emergency session of the General Assembly to try and prevent war.

”We owe it to future generations not to walk away from the United Nations at this critical time, for these new challenges – and the new standards that may come out of them – are as important for large states as they are for small ones,” said William Luers, president of the New York-based U.N. Association of USA (UNA-USA).

”The majority of Americans value the work of the United Nations, and they value their country’s participation in the United Nations,” he added.

A survey conducted in the past week and released Tuesday by the Washington-based Pew Research Center for the People & the Press revealed that majorities or strong pluralities in the United States and five of eight European countries said they believed the United Nations still plays an important role in international peace.

On Monday, U.S. President George W. Bush announced his decision to abandon all diplomatic efforts at the U.N. Security Council aimed at disarming Iraqi president Saddam Hussein of his weapons of mass destruction, and told the leader he must leave the country in 48 hours or face an attack.

But a coalition of NGOs, including Earth Media, the Centre for Constitutional Rights and Greenpeace International, is urging U.N. member states to uphold the U.N. charter by holding an emergency session of the 191-member General Assembly ”to avoid an illegal war against Iraq”.

The Assembly has a right to meet at an emergency session, the coalition argued, because the Security Council remains split on the issue of how to maintain international peace and security.

The U.S. decision to pull out of the Security Council was prompted by its failure to garner the nine votes it needed for an ill-fated resolution sponsored by the United States, Britain and Spain, which sought legitimacy for a military attack on Iraq.

Under the U.N. charter the 15-member Security Council is entrusted with the task of declaring war and peace. But in a now-famous resolution called ”Uniting for Peace” adopted in November 1950, the General Assembly stepped in to authorise U.N. enforcement action in the Korean War.

That resolution has been invoked 10 times in the 58-year history of the United Nations. The United States used it to pressure the then Soviet Union to cease its intervention in Hungary in 1956.

According to the resolution, ”if the Security Council, because of lack of unanimity of the permanent members, fails to exercise its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security in any case where there appears to be a threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression, the General Assembly shall consider the matter immediately with a view to making appropriate recommendations to members for collective measures, including in the case of a breach of peace or act of aggression the use of armed force when necessary, to maintain or restore international peace and security.”

Under the resolution, the Assembly would virtually take over the mandate of the Security Council to enforce international peace and security.

”If the Security Council cannot agree on Iraq, the whole issue should logically be moved to the General Assembly, which is a more democratic body,” says Michael Ratner, president of the Centre for Constitutional Rights.

Ratner said the Assembly, not the 15-member Security Council, really represents the will of the international community.

”It’s time the United Nations fully exercised its mandate and united as a whole to defend its founding principles and stop the impending attack on Iraq, which would be the most horrific example of unilateralism. It must take this last chance for peace,” said Steve Sawyer of Greenpeace International.

The International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms (IALANA) has circulated an appeal – signed by more than 300 lawyers worldwide – against the ”preventive use of force” by the United States.

The signatories include Christopher Weeramantry, a former vice president of the International Court of Justice in the Hague.

John Burroughs, executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy, said the Bush administration’s reference to the need for ”regime change” in Iraq as the reason for using force is barred by the U.N. charter, which prohibits ”the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state”.

Burroughs, an adjunct professor of international law at the Rutgers University Law School in New Jersey, said that in cases of large-scale internal violence or humanitarian catastrophe, some would argue that human rights triumph over state sovereignty, and therefore justify armed intervention.

”That has not been a principal rationale of the Bush administration, and while the Iraqi regime’s historical record is grisly, large-scale internal violence of the kind experienced in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia is not presently occurring,” he added.

”The assertion that the United States can act as enforcer of a Security Council edict, without consent of the Security Council, has no merit,” he added.