Chapter VI of the United Nations Charter addresses the pacific settlement of disputes. It establishes the primary obligation of all parties to a dispute to settle their dispute through peaceful means and then outlines the Security Council’s powers:
- to call upon parties to use peaceful means to end a dispute;
- to investigate any dispute to determine if a threat to international peace and security exists;
- to recommend “procedures or methods of adjustment”; and
- to recommend specific solutions to end the dispute stopping short of authorizing the “use of force” to achieve these ends.
Peaceful means elaborated under Chapter VI include negotiation, inquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, appeal to regional organizations, and other peaceful means. Inquiry, Mediation, Conciliation, and the appeal to Regional Organizations require third party involvement and the solution is driven more by national interest and politics rather than legal principles. Arbitration and Judicial Settlement result in legal solutions based on international law and obligations and is usually legally binding. Negotiation involves representatives of the parties to the dispute and requires a good faith effort to arrive at a compromise solution to the dispute.
Chapter VI in Practice
The Cold War years contributed to a very weak use and interpretation of the Chapter VI powers for peaceful dispute settlement by the Security Council. The Council’s actions in these years were confined to weak resolution which urged states to end hostilities and were limited to requests and recommendations on how to resolve crises. The inability of the Council in its early years to agree on a more dynamic interpretation of Chapter VI did, however, have an effect on the growth of the peacemaking responsibilities of the United Nations Secretary-General and his representatives. This increased role can be seen most clearly in the exercise of the Secretary-General’s Good Offices.
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Good Offices
The term 'Good Offices' is generally understood within the United Nations as the independent political role of the UN Secretary-General in preventing conflict between and within states. Good Offices are generally limited to mediating between parties to a dispute and do not usually include involvement in issues of substance. Although not specifically included under UN Charter Chapter VI, it is a mechanism which would fall within criteria for the pacific settlement of disputes. The use of Good Offices has generally depended on the dynamism of the sitting UN Secretary-General.
Examples of the use of Good Offices by the United Nations Secretary-General include Trygve Lie’s negotiations with representatives of China to start talks on settling the Korean War and Dag Hammarskjold’s initiative to free American prisoners of war, held since the Korean War. Notably, Hammarskjold was also invited by Laos to help explore solutions to the civil war in that country. Secretary-General U Thant is credited with his involvement in the Cuban missile crisis negotiations, and his initiative to start negotiations between India and Pakistan in 1965. U Thant’s involvement in the India-Pakistan crisis led to the establishment of the truce monitoring mission, the United Nations India-Pakistan Observer Mission (UNIPOM). The Secretary-General’s Good Offices function has also been successfully carried out by other high representatives in mediating civil wars in Cambodia, Mozambique, Nicaragua, El Salvador, to some extent crisis in the Former Yugoslavia etc. A glaring failure of the Secretary-Generals’ ability to use his Good Offices to mobilize political will to prevent genocide and mass atrocities is the example of Rwanda.
It should be noted that in recent years, the Security Council has used Chapter VI as the basis to authorize peacekeeping operations (consent based and without a use of force mandate) to mitigate further large scale violations of human rights. Examples include gaining the consent of the Cambodian government to pass a Security Council resolution creating a UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) to ensure full implementation of the comprehensive political settlement of the Cambodian conflict, and gaining consent to deploy UNOSOM I in mid-1992 to Somalia to separate warring factions and help with the delivery of humanitarian relief.
For more information please consult list of resources below.
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Resources
UN DocumentsOther Documents and Links
Articles:
Akhavan, Payam. “Enforcement of the Genocide Convention: A Challenge to Civilization.” Harvard Human Rights Journal 8 (1995): 229
Frank, Thomas M. “The Secretary-General’s Role in Conflict Prevention: Past, Present and Pure Conjecture.” European Journal of International Law 6 (1995) 360
Ratner, Steven R. “Image and Reality in the UN’s Peaceful Settlement of Disputes.” European Journal of International Law 6 (1995): 426
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