Britain and the Security Council

Abstract

When the drafters of the United Nations Charter decided that ‘The Security Council shall be so organized as to be able to function continuously’ (Article 28) and that ‘Any Member of the United Nations may bring any dispute … to the attention of the Security Council’ (Article 35), they did not, so far as I know, have in mind that the Council would function as a kind of mini General Assembly, a convenient debating chamber which could be called into being at short notice by a simple request, without having to invoke the cumbrous procedures necessary to mobilise meetings of the General Assembly outside regular sessions. It was, I assume, envisaged that the Council would meet only to discharge its ‘primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security’ (Article 24). However, the tendency to use the Council in order to air problems, some of which are only remotely connected with peace and war, to level the finger at major powers which are not prepared to support the policies of individual states or groups of states, without any expectation that eventual resolutions will be acted upon, has grown in proportion to the realisation that the majority of Council ‘decisions’, even those of a ‘mandatory’ nature, have little more than the recommendatory authority of General Assembly resolutions.