Mandate

The UN Security Council has primary responsibility over the maintenance of international peace and security. It is the only organ of the UN with the authority to issue binding or mandatory orders to member states. It is composed of 15 members; 10 of whom are elected for two-year terms, while the five permanent members (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) have a veto on all decisions and resolutions.

Security Council and the prevention of genocide

Following the dramatic changes during the late 1980s and early 1990s marked by the end of the Cold War, the Security Council entered a period of much greater dynamism, characterized by a willingness to engage in issues involving the promotion of human rights and, especially, the protection of ethnic minorities. The defining moment was the adoption of UNSC Resolution 688, by which the Security Council authorized various forcible measures to protect populations in northern and southern Iraq.

As a precedent, Resolution 688 signaled a new dimension of Security Council action. There were other subsequent manifestations of the Security Council’s willingness to intervene when ethnic minorities were at risk, even when conflict was principally internal in character. This involved a broad interpretation of the concept of the maintenance of international peace and security. It was also an important condition to the caveat in the UN Charter warning the organization away from action in areas that were "essentially within domestic jurisdiction".

By 1993, the Security Council entered yet another field of action, establishing the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The ICTY was aimed at an ongoing armed conflict, which was both internal and international, and whose central theme was "ethnic cleansing", with threats to the survival of entire populations. Security Council Resolution 827 justified the establishment of the ICTY by noting that it "would contribute to the restoration and maintenance of peace." In other words, the ICTY was predicated partly on a hypothesis of deterrence.

However, despite these and other developments suggesting that the Security Council had been energized to address attacks on human rights (and especially on ethnic minorities), the UN failed tragically in 1994 when the worst mass ethnically-driven killing since the Holocaust took the lives of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda.

The failure to act to prevent genocide in Rwanda has conditioned all subsequent debate on the prevention of genocide and other forms of mass killing. The Outcome Document of the World Summit of 2005 endorses the concept of the "responsibility to protect". The Outcome Document declares that "each individual member state has the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity". Regarding the prevention of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity in other states, the Outcome Document confirms that this is the responsibility of:

"[t]he international community, through the United Nations…in accordance with Chapter IV and VIII of the Charter, to help protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity."

It continues:

"In this context, we are prepared to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security Council, in accordance with the UN Charter, including Chapter VII, on a case by case basis and in cooperation with relevant regional organisations as appropriate, should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities manifestly failing [sic] to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity."

The pledge in the Outcome Document is an important reminder to the Security Council of its responsibility to intervene in appropriate cases, where populations are at greater risk and human dignity is in jeopardy.

Resources

NGO Documents

Other Documents and Links