The Use of Force and International Law

INTRODUCTION

It was discussed in Chapter 1 that there have been various attempts over the centuries to collectivise the security of states, for example through the nineteenth-century Concert of Europe and the League of Nations of 1919. With the formation of the United Nations (UN) in 1945 – which, today, enjoys virtually universal membership – member states agreed to go further and attempted to fully collectivise the use of forcible measures. The UN Charter attempts to do this in two ways. First, in their determination ‘to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war’ the founding states agreed that ‘armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest’. With the backdrop of this underlying aim, the Charter goes beyond simply making the UN a dispute resolution organisation, as was arguably the case with the League of Nations, so as to – perhaps idealistically – provide it with broad powers to use, and threaten to use, force. Indeed, the first purpose of the UN, as spelt out in Article 1(1) of the UN Charter, is ‘[t]o maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace’. The use of force under the auspices of the UN is, as such, contained within the Charter as an exception to the prohibition of the use of force, as set out and examined in Part I of this book.

However, and secondly, while the Charter also affirmed that member states possess an ‘inherent’ right of individual and collective self-defence, this is firmly framed within Article 51 of the Charter as being under the ultimate oversight of the Security Council and is contained within Chapter VII of the UN Charter within the context of the enforcement powers of the Council. While the Council's role in states invoking and implementing the right of self-defence will be examined in greater detail in Chapter 6, the purpose of the chapters in this Part of the book is to examine the use of force under the auspices of the UN, in particular the Security Council.