UN General Assembly
2003

decades challenged the conventional concepts of non- intervention and the sovereign equality of States. Another challenge to traditional approaches has been the threat posed by non-State actors, especially the contemporary menace posed by perpetrators of international terrorism. The problem posed by rebel groups in civil conflicts is another example. In its efforts to respond to egregious violations of human rights, starvation, anarchy and chaos, the Security Council had already stretched both the authority of the United Nations to intervene and the definition of “threats to the peace” and “aggression”. The war in Iraq was not the first time, and will not be the last time, that the Security Council was unable to act. The hope of the late 1980s and early 1990s that the end of the cold war would at last enable the Security Council to discharge its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security has long been shattered. In retrospect, Iraq’s invasion and annexation of Kuwait in 1990 represented an unusually clear-cut violation of fundamental Charter principles. That