Is International Law or the UN still Relevant to Our World?
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada
As of the writing of these lines, the UN Security Council (UNSC) in New York, remains moribund in adopting a resolution calling for a ceasefire or pause in hostilities in Gaza.
Israel’s onslaught against the tiny and constricted enclave of Gaza—where 2.4 million Palestinians are forced to live, cramped in a strip of land 43 kms long and 12 kms wide, at its broadest—began on October 7.
Gaza has often been described, by those sympathetic to the plight and suffering of its hapless inhabitants, as the world’s ‘largest open-air prison’ because it has remained under a suffocating, all encompassing, land, air and sea blockade of Israel since 2007.
In its response to Hamas’ incursion that led to the killing of nearly 1,200 Israelis, Israeli armed forces have reduced Gaza to heaps of rubble. More than 19,000 Palestinians have been killed under Israel’s relentless assault of the tiny enclave. More than two-thirds of these victims are women and children. Countless others are said to be buried under huge dumps of debris and rubble. Schools, mosques, churches et al. haven’t been spared either.
The most conspicuous of targets of the assault are Gaza’s hospitals and primary health care units. 26 out of 35 hospitals in Gaza have been rendered incapacitated and helpless to help the victims of war. Out of 52 primary healthcare units, 32 have been knocked out or reduced to a state of dysfunction.
Despite all this mountain of destruction heaped over Gaza and its inhabitants, UNSC, charged under the UN Charter with the primary responsibility to enforce peace in a crisis, has been unable to adopt even a resolution calling for cessation of hostilities, much less enforcing peace, in 9 long weeks.
What explains such a limbo in which UNSC apparently finds itself stranded?
The answer is, because of a permanent member of the Council, armed with the power of Veto, not agreeing with the other 14 members of it.
The power of Veto was granted to the five founding member states of the UN—US, UK, France, Russia and China—at the time of the world body’s founding, in 1945, at the end of WWII, in the romantic expectation that these war allies would remain united in peace and, together, shall ensure global peace and order.
This fancy notion that disparate allies of WWII would remain on the same page, forever, evaporated into thin air within the infancy of UN. The Cold War that quickly followed on the heels of the Great War doused tons of cold water on the false expectation of unity. UNSC has never been able to dig itself out of the pit it was dumped into with the commencement of the Cold War.
The latest effort by UAE, within the Council, to fine-tune the wording of its draft resolution to meet US insistence and expectations has run into a fog of constant haggling among members of the Security Council.
The latest effort in the Council is the result of the Western world—which had earlier shut its eyes, completely, to the suffering and plight of the Gaza Palestinians—belatedly waking up to unprecedented toil of the Gaza inhabitants. The social media and huge rallies of those standing for human rights, has been the catalyst to force Western governments to rally round the call for an earliest ceasefire, or whatever form of cessation of hostilities to lend a breath of life to the Gazans.
It also follows the rare invocation of Article 99 of the UN Charter by Secretary General Antonio Guterres, insisting that UNSC find a way to peace through its collective efforts. Guterres has been Secretary General of the UN since 2017 but he has exercised this exclusive privilege of his for the first time since becoming the world’s top diplomat.
In the interregnum, the UN General Assembly (UNGA) has voted in favor of a ceasefire with an overwhelming majority, with 153 of its 193 members calling for an end to hostilities. But its resolutions are non-enforceable and non-binding under the provisions of the UN Charter.
The bottom line of all this litany of efforts by an overwhelming number of UN member states is that they can feel for the human rights of the people of Gaza.
So, a standstill agonizingly continues to prevail in the Security Council, despite the best efforts of its non-permanent members, in particular to come up with a mechanism of peace.
The UN, incapacitated and rendered helpless to do its basic task to enforce and ensure peace in the world, is becoming increasingly irrelevant to the fundamental idea behind its birth.
It reminds one of the ignoble demise of The League of Nations, founded at the end of World War I, with much of the same elan and expectations as UN. In fact, the League of Nations is deemed by many as the precursor to the UN.
The League of Nations collapsed into irrelevance and was rendered a non-entity when it failed, miserably, to call out Italy’s blatant aggression and occupation of Ethiopia (then known as Abyssinia) in 1935.
One would’ve thought that the unfortunate demise of the League of Nations would be a lesson for the UN, not to repeat. But, in the end, one is forced to conclude that raw power is still a powerful instrument and weapon in the hands of its wielder to shun any responsibility under, or regard for, international law. One could only hope that the UN would survive this greatest challenge to its fundamental raison d’etre.
Closer home to Pakistan, the Indian Supreme Court’s endorsement—in its judgment of last December 11—of Modi government’s unilateral scrapping, on August 5, 2019, of the Indian-Occupied Jammu and Kashmir’s special status under Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, is a rude reminder that rule of law in ‘Secular India’ is under assault, too. It’s yet another case study for any student of international relations that power trumps law even in so-called liberal and democratic entities. - K_K_ghori@hotmail.com
(The author is a former ambassador and career diplomat)
