The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (31 page)

The General Assembly confirmed the mandate of the US-led forces in Korea, perpetuating the legality of military action, and asked the Collective Measures Committee to consider additional measures to meet the North Korean and Chinese attacks. The resolution did not authorize any further actions beyond the already ongoing military activities, which had been authorized earlier by the Security Council. However, it kept the UN involved in the diplomatic efforts to end the war in Korea. Since then, both the Security Council and the General Assembly have made use of their prerogative to call for an emergency special session eleven times, to transfer consideration of an issue from the Security Council to the General Assembly (
Appendix 6
). Most of the other provisions in the Uniting for Peace resolution, however, were never implemented, or quickly fell dormant, victims of the politics of the Cold War.
²⁶

Since the Korean war, the Uniting for Peace procedure has been used eleven times, seven times by the Security Council in resolutions transferring an issue to the General Assembly, and four times by the General Assembly itself after a majority of member states requested an emergency special session. Almost six years after the resolution was passed, the Security Council called for an emergency special session when France and the UK vetoed a resolution demanding the withdrawal of Israeli forces which, in collaboration with the French and British governments, had attacked Egypt to end Gamal Abdel Nasser’s control over the Suez Canal.
²⁷
Only a few days later the Council called for another emergency special session when the Soviet Union vetoed a resolution requesting the withdrawal of its troops from Hungary, and the admission of observers appointed by the UN Secretary-General, to assess the need for humanitarian aid.
²⁸
In 1958 the Council, in disagreement over the presence of British and American troops in Jordan and the Lebanon respectively, agreed to refer the matter to another emergency special session of the General Assembly.
²⁹

In the Congo crisis in 1960, disagreement over the relationship between the United Nations Operation in the Congo (ONUC) and the Congolese government resulted in a Soviet veto and saw the issue handed to the General Assembly.
³⁰
While the Soviet Union wanted ONUC explicitly to support the Congolese government of Patrice Lumumba, the Western powers and the UN Secretary-General wanted the mission to maintain neutrality between the different sides.
³¹
The US claimed that the Soviet Union had unilaterally asserted the right to introduce troops into the Congo, and asked the General Assembly to clarify and confirm ONUC’s mandate as the only legitimate international presence in the Congo, which it duly did.
³²

The final three times the Security Council requested the General Assembly to take on an issue because it was deadlocked by a veto were in 1971 over the conflict between India and Pakistan over East Pakistan (Bangladesh),
³³
in 1980 following Soviet intervention in Afghanistan,
³⁴
and in 1982 over the Israeli annexation of the Golan Heights.
³⁵
As the General Assembly was in its regular session at the time of the India–Pakistan conflict, no emergency special session was called in that instance.

In addition to the Security Council, individual member states can request an emergency special session of the General Assembly under the Uniting for Peace resolution, if a majority of General Assembly members supports it.
³⁶
In 1967, the General Assembly called for an emergency special session for the first time, at the request of the Soviet Union, to address the six-day war in the Middle East.
³⁷
This case stands out as the Soviet Union did not make the request because the Security Council was blocked by a veto (it was not, as a majority of the Security Council’s members had voted against the Soviet draft resolution), but – as it argued – because Israel had failed to obey the Security Council’s demands for a ceasefire.
³⁸
While the US objected that this was an improper use of the Uniting for Peace procedure, the General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to convene an emergency session, with ninty-eight countries in favour and three against (US, Israel, and Botswana), with three abstentions. Despite this strong support for an emergency session, the Soviet Union’s draft resolution explicitly condemning Israel in the General Assembly was overwhelmingly rejected – just as it had been in the Security Council.
³⁹

In 1980, the General Assembly again called an emergency special session, following a request by Senegal, then chair of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People. The US had vetoed a Tunisian draft resolution in the Security Council on 30 April 1980, which called on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories, and emphasized the Palestinian right to a state and right to return.
⁴⁰
The emergency special session, which was adjourned several times and continued until September 1982 (raising questions about its ‘emergency’ character), was used by Arab states as a tool to denounce Israel’s policy in the occupied territories, and brand Israel as an aggressor and ‘not a peace-loving member state’,
⁴¹
thereby implicitly questioning Israel’s right to be a member of the United Nations.
⁴²

In September 1981 an emergency special session on Namibia was called at the request of Zimbabwe, following vetoes in April 1981 by France, the UK, and the US of resolutions calling for wider sanctions on South Africa.
⁴³
The issue, one of decolonization rather than peace and security, and the fact that the emergency session was called almost five months after the vetoes, raises questions about the emergency character of the session, which called for the end of the South African occupation of Namibia, military financial support for SWAPO, and sanctions on South Africa.
⁴⁴

The final emergency special session was called in 1997 on request of Qatar, then leader of the Arab Group in the UN, on the question of East Jerusalem and the occupied territories, following two US vetoes of resolutions condemning Israel’s settlement policy in Jerusalem.
⁴⁵
Israel denounced the session as polarizing, and argued that the settlement issue did not constitute an issue of international peace and security.
⁴⁶
The session was adjourned several times and met last in January 2007, again raising the question whether the states calling for the session saw it as a tool to denounce Israel rather than an instrument to address an emergency threat, in particular as some of the emergency special session’s meetings coincided with regular Assembly sessions in which the issue could have been discussed. The use of the emergency special session thus merely served to raise the profile of the issue. An important consequence of the 10th emergency special session, though, was that it allowed the General Assembly to request an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice on the legality of the construction of a wall by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territory.
⁴⁷
In its opinion, the court found the construction of the wall to be contrary to international law.
⁴⁸
While the emergency special sessions might have helped to keep the issue of Palestine on the UN’s agenda and in the public eye, the polarizing anti-Israeli rhetoric in these emergency special sessions, reflected in the notorious 1975 ‘Zionism is Racism’ General Assembly resolution,
⁴⁹
undoubtedly also confirmed the Israeli perception that the UN (and the General Assembly in particular) could not be trusted, and limited the role of the UN in the Middle East peace process until the late 1990s.
⁵⁰

The discussion above shows how the Uniting for Peace procedure has been used in a range of different contexts, and for a range of different purposes. It has been employed to request the creation of a peacekeeping mission (Suez), and to confirm or strengthen the mandate of UN missions (Korea, Congo). It has been used to condemn armed interventions (Suez, Hungary, Lebanon and Jordan, Afghanistan, and the Golan Heights), and to call for ceasefires (Suez and India–Pakistan). It has been used, by both the Security Council and the General Assembly, to condemn some of Israel’s policies in the occupied territories, and finally, has been invoked to promote decolonization in Namibia. Three trends can be identified from this brief examination of the use of the Uniting for Peace procedure: a changing initiator of the Uniting for Peace procedure, changing issues leading to the use of the resolution, and changing measures taken in response.

First, the initiative for using the process has increasingly moved from the Security Council to the General Assembly. Three of the last four sessions were called by the Assembly at the request of member states, and the two sessions on the question of Palestine in the 1980s and 1990s have been recalled several times and have lasted several years, unlike any of the generally brief sessions called by the Council.

Three factors help to explain the decreasing use of the Uniting for Peace procedure by the Security Council. First, there have been relatively few vetoes in the post-Cold War era, which could have triggered a call for the General Assembly to take on an issue. From January 1990 until October 2006, there have only been nineteen vetoes, twelve of which have been connected to the situation in the Middle East, on which an emergency session called by the General Assembly has been in place since 1997. None of these vetoed resolutions mentioned threats to international peace and security; the vetoes, all by the US, were the result of language condemning Israel.
⁵¹
Only two of the resolutions vetoed after 1989 made references to
Chapter VII
or to threats to international peace and security, and could therefore have legitimized the use of the Uniting for Peace procedure. Both resolutions addressed the issue of Bosnia and Herzegovina,
⁵²
an issue where the Security
Council at the time of the vetoed resolutions (1994 and 2002) was deeply involved,
⁵³
and clearly not paralysed by the veto.

Alongside the reduction in the number of vetoes, the Permanent Members increased their use of informal negotiations before official Council meetings, in particular in the early 1990s.
⁵⁴
Such negotiations marginalized not only the Nonpermanent Members of the Council, but also the wider UN membership. As the French ambassador to the UN observed in December 1994,

As Nico Krisch argues elsewhere in this volume, the prevalence of informal negotiations has meant that non-members rarely have the information to challenge decisions or to express their views in Council debates.
⁵⁶
This has further enhanced the primacy of the Security Council in matters of international peace and security, and has made it less likely that Council members (in particular the P5) would be willing to pass controversial issues to the General Assembly under the Uniting for Peace procedure.

Secondly, during the Cold War the spheres of influence of the great powers limited the debate by the Security Council in particular about interventions by the P5 in their respective spheres of influence. This limited the possibility for vetoes, and consequently for using the Uniting for Peace procedure. American covert or semi-covert interventions in Latin America were rarely addressed by the Council, nor were Soviet actions in Eastern Europe. The Soviet intervention in Hungary at first glance appears to be an exception to this. However, Hungary was discussed predominantly because the British and French governments pushed in the Council for a referral of the Hungary question to the General Assembly to take the heat off them at the height of the Suez crisis. Similarly, the Soviet Union had decided to use the opportunity of Suez for its second intervention in Hungary, calculating that the US and the world public would be preoccupied with the crisis in the Middle East.
⁵⁷
The US government was keen throughout the Hungary crisis to communicate to the USSR that it would not intervene in the conflict, and lobbied intensely at the UN against any action with regard to Hungary.
⁵⁸
It had clearly no interest in interfering in the sphere of influence of the other superpower.
⁵⁹

Finally, Security Council members, in particular the P5, also seem to have been increasingly reluctant to use the Uniting for Peace procedure. It is easy to see why this would be the case. First, its use undermines their most important formal privilege: the veto. Had it been used more regularly, the procedure could have undermined the usefulness of the veto in protecting the interests of the P5. Secondly, decolonization and the resulting increase of the General Assembly’s membership has made it an increasingly unpredictable body, less likely to follow the lead of the great powers in the Security Council. While in the 1950s the US could generally rely on the support of the Latin American and European states in the General Assembly when it argued strongly for the Uniting for Peace resolution, the composition of the GA, and the politics of its members, changed rapidly in the 1960s. As a result, the US subsequently found itself more often than not at odds with the majority of developing countries. The British Foreign Office had been sceptical about the Uniting for Peace proposal in 1950 for exactly that reason, fearing that it might cause problems if in the future the majority of UN members might no longer be supportive of the Western powers.
⁶⁰