Between flexibility and accountability

Since 1990 the United Nations (UN) Security Council (UNSC) has authorised states or coalitions of states to use force on multiple occasions. It has done so in Iraq, ² Bosnia-Herzegovina, ³ Somalia, ⁴ Rwanda, ⁵ Haiti, ⁶ Zaïre, ⁷ Albania, ⁸ the Central African Republic (CAR), ⁹ Guinea-Bissau, ¹⁰ Kosovo, ¹¹ Timor-Leste, ¹² Afghanistan, ¹³ Côte d’Ivoire, ¹⁴ the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), ¹⁵ Chad, ¹⁶ Libya ¹⁷ and Mali. ¹⁸ Unlike use-of-force mandates given to ‘robust’ UN peacekeeping forces acting under UN flag and command, ¹⁹ these authorisations, given to individual states or ‘coalitions of the willing’, introduce into the collective security system a strong element of decentralisation. This system of delegating the power to use force under Article 42 of the UN Charter to individual states or coalitions raises various concerns, especially when the states that take action on the basis of these UNSC resolutions have a direct interest in the countries in which they are intervening. There is a clear danger that such states might use the UNSC’s authorisation as a cover to pursue their own agenda and justify what would be otherwise an unlawful intervention.