UN General Assembly
1990

United Nations resolutions must be applied ne varietur. They are not negotiable. The United Nations faces an historic task: to enforce its own Charter and international law. Failure now would mean a particularly serious - possibly a fatal - loss of prestige that would lead the United Nations into the kind of situation in which the League of Nations found itself engulfed on the eve of the Second World War. It is thus of paramount importance for the United Nations to keep on taking all further steps needed for an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait. The economic sanctions are an important, a crucial, experiment. If the world community succeeds in forcing a dictator to respect international law, without this leading to armed conflict, an essential precedent for the future of the entire family of nations will have been set.