Source: https://www.justsecurity.org/63415/an-insiders-view-of-the-life-cycle-of-self-defense-reports-by-u-n-member-states/
Timestamp: 2019-04-22 16:02:33+00:00

Document:
On 31 October 2018, responding to the movement of migrants from Central America toward the southern US border, President Donald Trump tweeted: “The Caravans are made up of some very tough fighters and people. Fought back hard and viciously against Mexico at Northern Border before breaking through. Mexican soldiers hurt, were unable, or unwilling to stop Caravan. Should stop them before they reach our Border, but won’t!” (emphasis added). Later, in February 2019, President Trump declared a national emergency on the border with Mexico. The words used by President Trump and the circumstances around them are worryingly similar to the recent invocation by some States, including the United States, of the so-called “unwilling or unable” standard to justify the use of military force against non-state actors in other State’s territory as though such conditions satisfy Article 51 of the UN Charter.
While the application of the “unwilling or unable” standard to international law on the use of force has generated discussion amongst academics and commentators, less well known is how controversial this doctrine remains amongst States. This is partly because of the procedural secrecy and inefficiency in the way the UN Security Council addresses these issues. In this essay, I explain some of these problems from the perspective of a UN delegate, and outline an initiative put forward by Mexico to help all States to engage and participate in debates of such fundamental importance.
If silence were to be taken as acceptance on the law, the question is whether all States are indeed truly in a position to react to such practice.
In order to understand properly this “silence,” it is crucial to know the circumstances, context, and procedure by which the letters invoking self-defense and the “unable or unwilling” standard are sent and dealt with inside the United Nations. In my view, the silence of many UN Members States does not reflect a lack of interest and cannot be considered as acquiescence regarding any novel legal interpretations of Art. 51 of the UN Charter on the use of force against terrorists in a third country. This is for several reasons related primarily to the lack of transparency in UN Security Council procedure.
The way in which this issue is handled by the Security Council is extremely opaque, and not transparent to most Member States. None of the Article 51 letters I reference above have triggered a public debate in the Security Council to evaluate their content, validity, and adherence to the UN Charter. Neither has the Security Council taken any measure to maintain or restore international peace and security in response to those letters. Based on my own experience, it seems that the prevailing practice of the Council is to limit itself to receiving and distributing the letters among its Members, which gives some the mistaken impression that, as long as a State covers the formality of reporting its actions, it can then claim a de facto carte blanche to use force without further scrutiny or control by the Council. This is very troubling given that the Security Council has the primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security.
1. Despite being documents of profound interest to all States, relating to the core prohibition on the use of force under Art. 2(4) of the UN Charter, these letters are not circulated to all UN Members. The stated purpose of the United Nations is the maintenance of international peace and security and the Security Council acts on behalf of all UN Members States, yet there is not even a link on the Council’s webpage to find these documents.
2. In these circumstances, delegates have to find Art. 51 letters themselves, and this is a very difficult and circular task: To find these documents in the UN Official Document System you basically need the detailed information (official document symbol, title of the document, or relevant state) you can only get from the letter itself.
4. A final option is to subscribe to the system eSubscription to United Nations Documents. By doing so, the system sends daily emails with the documents issued by the Security Council, but is a very inefficient mechanism: The documents in the email are only referenced by their official UN symbol without including their title, while many others have very general titles like “Letter dated 12 march 2019 from the Permanent Representative of the Sudan to the United Nations addressed to the President of the Security Council,” which offer no indication to the subject matter of the document. Therefore, the only practical way of finding an Art. 51 letter through the emails sent by eSubscription is to open daily each and every one of the links to the documents, noting that they are not circulated on the same date they were issued, to verify their content—something beyond the capacity of most delegations given their heavy workload and limited resources.
At the end of the day, the most effective way to obtain these letters is through comradery: asking colleagues to kindly share either the letters sent by their own delegations or those they have obtained from others. It goes without saying that this is far from a full-proof or fair mechanism. No Member State should have to go through this trouble to get a hold of a public UN document related to the UN’s core function of maintaining international peace and security.
Consequently, if a delegation is not a Security Council member, it is not actively part of a coalition using force to counter terrorism in other countries, and it doesn’t have the time or human resources to track down these letters, it is almost impossible for it to take part of the discussion on the substantive legal terms that this practice entails. Most UN Member States are left in the dark.
Notwithstanding these procedural issues, there is a growing sense that not all Member States agree with the novel interpretations of Art. 51 advanced by a few States. Despite the many procedural limitations, Mexico has raised its concerns with the “unable or unwilling” standard on several occasions in the context of different UN debates (see here, here, and here, all in Spanish).
Other Latin American countries, like Brazil, have also been very vocal on this issue too.
Unfortunately, there has not been sufficient attention to these divergent views in academic writings. This is understandably so given that, first, these UN debates are generally unknown to an audience who is not familiar with the UN’s detailed agenda, especially when it comes to debates within the Committees of the General Assembly (even more so when they are available only in languages other than English); and second, because there is currently no UN forum with a specific agenda item that would allow all Members States to address these challenges. Consequently, these references to the interpretation of Art. 51 end up “hidden” in speeches on topics which do not directly address this issue.
In an attempt to open up a forum for all states to engage in a public and transparent debate on these issues, Mexico has proposed an agenda item to tackle this particular question for the Special Committee on the Charter of the United Nations and on the Strengthening of the Role of the Organization. The details of this proposal were spelled out last year in the debate of the Sixth Committee on the report of the Special Committee (see the related document in Spanish). The Special Committee on the Charter is a subsidiary body of the GA and all Member States participate in it. Its mandate, as referenced in General Assembly resolution 70/117, includes to “continue its consideration of all proposals concerning the question of the maintenance of international peace and security in all its aspects in order to strengthen the role of the United Nations.” Hopefully, this proposal may help open a space for States to share information and to shed more light on this topic, offering all States a meaningful opportunity to express their views on this important question. The Special Committee has already taken note of this proposal in the section on Identification of new subjects of its 2018 and 2019 reports, respectively, most recently at its 2019 session last month.
Regardless of the future of this specific initiative, there is an urgent need for States to openly discuss these current challenges to international law which can determine the way in which we understand the collective security system in the future. For that to happen, there has to be more transparency on the way in which States report back to the Security Council in accordance with Art. 51 of the UN Charter.
Even if they are far from becoming law, the precedents that we have today are dangerous and open the door to interpretations that can seriously undermine the rule-based order upon which the UN system is built, particularly in the context of countering terrorism where certain legal margins remain unclear and where the Security Council, being a political organ, has been de facto legislating for several years. The fact that just this month President Trump reportedly declared that he is thinking “very seriously” about labeling Mexican drug cartels as terrorists is one more example of how pressing this question has become. International law should not and cannot be defined by a few; it is vital to take into consideration the views of all States on an issue that concerns the peace and security of the whole international community.
Legal Adviser of the Permanent Mission of Mexico to the United Nations. I want to express my deepest gratitude to Naz K. Modirzadeh, Director of the Harvard Law School Program on International Law and Armed Conflict, for offering a compass to navigate in the dark, and to Alex Moorehead, Lecturer-in-Law and Director of the Columbia Law School Program on Counterterrorism, Armed Conflict, and Human Rights, for his invaluable support in this journey. The views expressed are solely in my personal capacity.

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