PUTRAJAYA: Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) has failed to prevent wars, as many global conflicts arise from its member nations acting without consensus.
That isnt really true, as most examples of what the UN does show. Conventions on all kinds of issues that are ratified are things that member states are technically obligated to adhere to, there just are few effective mechanisms to enforce them into it.
The international criminal court is probably the foremost example. A member state is not free to commit war crimes just because they want to, and all states are obligated to abide by the Geneva convention or face consequences for it. Although that is a convention that determines interactions between sovereign states, not interior issues.
But human rights conventions are also a similar obligation that member states are supposed to adhere to, and the UN is certainly capable of attempting to force member states to abide by them. Its just rarely effective. For example, the US refused to ratify conventions on labor organization rights over 70 years ago, and is obligated every year to answer to the UN why US citizens dont have those rights. In practice this means that every year the US tells the UN “because we dont want to give people those rights, our rights are good enough even if below standard” and then the UN can basically do fuck all about it simply because no one is going to go force the US government to comply. And since 99.9% of US citizens dont know or care that they lack labor rights that are considered human rights by the rest of the world there is no internal pressure. So the UN just has to let it go.
But that doesnt mean that on a technical basis that the UN doesnt have the authority to say the US is out of compliance when it is. And it doesnt mean that US sovereignty overrides international convention. It just means that in practice the US can flaunt international regulations on human rights. As do many other countries like Russia and China. The obligation exists, its just ignored
Right, that would be the kind of “collective action” that I mentioned… it doesn’t have anything to do with preventing nations from going to war with each other… the UN doesn’t have that kind of authority and never did.
I was taking issue with the statement “the UN was not intended to override the sovereignty of member nations” considering that in many respects UN convention certainly overrides national sovereignty. At least for smaller states that can be coerced as such
But even then, the idea that the UN was not intended to prevent wars is also false. That was basically the entire point of creating an international body before human rights and other focuses were ever in the conversation.
The League of Nations was invented as a result of WWI and the treaty of Versailles in the interest of preventing another world war. The precursor to that was the 1899 International Peace Conference “held in The Hague to elaborate instruments for settling crises peacefully, preventing wars and codifying rules of warfare”
The whole, at least original, point of international governance is specifically to prevent conflict.
The goals for the UN as outlined at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference make that pretty clear, as peace are literally the first two aims of the organization:
The stated purposes of the proposed international organization were:
To maintain international peace and security; and to that end to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace and the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means adjustment or settlement of international disputes which may lead to a breach of the peace;
To develop friendly relations among nations and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace;
To achieve international co-operation in the solution of international economic, social and other humanitarian problems; and
To afford a center for harmonizing the actions of nations in the achievement of these common ends.
That isnt really true, as most examples of what the UN does show. Conventions on all kinds of issues that are ratified are things that member states are technically obligated to adhere to, there just are few effective mechanisms to enforce them into it.
The international criminal court is probably the foremost example. A member state is not free to commit war crimes just because they want to, and all states are obligated to abide by the Geneva convention or face consequences for it. Although that is a convention that determines interactions between sovereign states, not interior issues.
But human rights conventions are also a similar obligation that member states are supposed to adhere to, and the UN is certainly capable of attempting to force member states to abide by them. Its just rarely effective. For example, the US refused to ratify conventions on labor organization rights over 70 years ago, and is obligated every year to answer to the UN why US citizens dont have those rights. In practice this means that every year the US tells the UN “because we dont want to give people those rights, our rights are good enough even if below standard” and then the UN can basically do fuck all about it simply because no one is going to go force the US government to comply. And since 99.9% of US citizens dont know or care that they lack labor rights that are considered human rights by the rest of the world there is no internal pressure. So the UN just has to let it go.
But that doesnt mean that on a technical basis that the UN doesnt have the authority to say the US is out of compliance when it is. And it doesnt mean that US sovereignty overrides international convention. It just means that in practice the US can flaunt international regulations on human rights. As do many other countries like Russia and China. The obligation exists, its just ignored
Right, that would be the kind of “collective action” that I mentioned… it doesn’t have anything to do with preventing nations from going to war with each other… the UN doesn’t have that kind of authority and never did.
I was taking issue with the statement “the UN was not intended to override the sovereignty of member nations” considering that in many respects UN convention certainly overrides national sovereignty. At least for smaller states that can be coerced as such
But even then, the idea that the UN was not intended to prevent wars is also false. That was basically the entire point of creating an international body before human rights and other focuses were ever in the conversation.
The League of Nations was invented as a result of WWI and the treaty of Versailles in the interest of preventing another world war. The precursor to that was the 1899 International Peace Conference “held in The Hague to elaborate instruments for settling crises peacefully, preventing wars and codifying rules of warfare”
The whole, at least original, point of international governance is specifically to prevent conflict.
The goals for the UN as outlined at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference make that pretty clear, as peace are literally the first two aims of the organization: