[casi] Why UN rule is not law

[Peter Brooke <pbrooke@DELETETHISukonline.co.uk>]

Dear list

In my 'last news mailing' (which, it turns out, is not going to be quite as
final as I had thought it would be) I referred to a number of pamphlets by
Brendan Clifford, published at the time of the UN Gulf War in 1991 - The
Crisis over Iraq, Law [not 'Iraq' as given in the mailing] and the New World
Order and The First United Nations War (available through the Athol Books
website at www.atholbooks.org). These  argued that the system established
under the UN Charter could never develop into a real system of international
law - that it had in fact been designed to prevent the emergence of such a
system. Now that the conquest of Iraq has been legitimised by the UN
Security Council and can no longer be described as 'illegal' I think we
should be looking more attentively at questions of international law. I'm
therefore posting an extact from one of these pamphlets - Law and the New
World order, which, in particular, comments briefly on the process by which
the system was set up, comparing it to the much maligned system of the Lague
of Nations:

Why United Nations Rule Is Not Law
(Extract from Law & The New World Order, by Brendan Clifford, Bevin Society,
1991)

A system of law is a set of rules binding on a body of subjects under a
definite authority which is competent to judge all cases of alleged breach
of those rules, and to enforce judgments. And the maxim that nobody is to be
judge in his own case must apply in all cases.

The subjects of domestic law are individuals and corporations. The subjects
of International Law are independent states. International law might consist
of one single law, forbidding any state to engage in an act of war against
any other state. The sovereignty of individual states must be relinquished
to an international authority on the points on which there is international
law. The minimum relinquishment of national sovereignty necessary to the
existence of International Law is in fact a major relinquishment of
sovereignty ‹ the right to go to war must be relinquished.

The United Nations has made efforts to go beyond that minimum, and to usurp
the sovereignty of states on matters of their internal operation, but the
fact is that even the necessary minimum of law was never established.

States will not relinquish sovereignty on the point of making war to a
system of international law if that system is spurious. The United Nations
as an authority maintaining a system of International Law is obviously
spurious.

United Nations law is mere ideological propaganda operated in a private
interest The system of International Law operated by the United Nations is
spurious in a way that does not just make it inadequate, but that makes it
an insuperable obstacle to the development of a system of real International
Law.

It is spurious on three grounds: it does not apply to all member states, it
does not apply the maxim that nobody is to be a judge in his own case, and
it does not operate with even a semblance of regularity.

The United Nations is, for all practical purposes, the Security Council. The
Security Council is in no sense a representative committee of the General
Assembly. The General Assembly is a garnishing scattered around the margins
of the Security Council. And that is what it was designed to be.

The Security Council itself is for all practical purposes, the five
permanent members of it. The nine transient members are there to take the
bad look off it. This, again, is intentional. The founders of the United
Nations designed it in such a way that it would be their policy instrument
on any matters in which they were in agreement, and that it would be
harmless to each of them on matters where they disagreed.

It has often been said that the United Nations was an improvement on the
League of Nations, and that the mistakes made in the construction of the
League were remedied in it That is true only if it is meant that there was
too much equality amongst the members of the League. The United Nations is a
strictly oligarchical organisation designed to ensure an ongoing dominance
in world affairs by the victor states of 1945. The League might conceivably
have evolved to become a world framework of international law. The United
Nations is, by design, incapable of evolving in that direction.

The United States, in the form of President Woodrow Wilson, created the
League of Nations in 1919. But the Congress decided that the United States
would not participate in what the President had constructed. America
boycotted the League because it was not prepared to relinquish one jot of
sovereignty to any foreign body. That was entirely to its credit. Other
states, including Britain, engaged in the hypocrisy of joining the League,
with the intention of remaining absolutely sovereign nevertheless.

President Roosevelt in 1944/45 did learn from the mistakes made by President
Wilson in 1918/19. The United Nations was constructed in such a way that
Congress might approve of joining it. The Veto on the Security Council is a
device for maintaining the absolute and limitless legal sovereignty of a
state holding it, despite that state being a member of the United Nations.
There is at least no hypocrisy here, as there was with membership of the
League by Britain and other powerful states of the time. The Veto is a clear
and open exemption from International Law in the framework of the United
Nations.

Western propaganda during the Cold War represented the Veto as a necessary
concession to the Soviet Union to induce it to participate in the United
Nations. But there is no actual doubt that it was equally necessary to
induce the United States Congress to ratify American participation in the
United Nations. Congress is so clear in its determination to retain absolute
American sovereignty, and to allow no standing within the jurisdiction of
the United States to anything foreign, that it has for forty years refused
to ratify even the Convention on Genocide drawn up within the United Nations
in its early years.

I don't think that refusal had any connection with the fact that the United
Stales itself is based on a comprehensive act of genocide. When the issue
first arose in the early fifties American culture had no doubt about the
justice of obliterating the Indian peoples. In American minds that was a
case of punishing evil, and the idea that it was genocide would have seemed
ridiculously far-fetched and pedantic.

Washington and Moscow were both determined to retain absolute sovereignty
and to remain superior to the international organisation which they were
constructing. Absolute sovereignty was conferred on China and France,
neither of which existed as an actual and effective state at the time. It
was conferred on China by American insistence, to Churchill's great
irritation. Washington took it for granted that China would be in the United
States sphere of influence in the post-war war world. Churchill in return
insisted that France be created one of the absolutely sovereign states which
would domineer over the United Nations. He said he wanted a buffer between
Britain and Russia.

And then there were five.

But Churchill must be excused of responsibility for the creation of the
fraudulent system we know as the United Nations ‹ and since he was Prime
Minister of Britain, I suppose Britain must be excused, though I think
Churchill was far from being representative of Britain in this matter. He
disagreed fundamentally with the United Nations project. He was happy to use
the phrase, "the United Nations", for the Allied powers when Roosevelt
suggested it in 1942, but he disliked the American scheme for a universal
organisation which would be a sort of parody of a world state. He favoured
instead a series of regional organisations, each of which would be the
sphere of influence of one of the Great Powers. And that would in my view
have been a very much better kind of post-war settlement than the United
Nations as actually constructed. (See The Hinge Of Fate, 1955 edition,
p623/4.) But in the course of the war the United States became very much the
senior partner in the Anglo- American relationship, and Churchill found it
prudent to go along with the universal scheme which was so close to
Roosevelt's heart.

Statements made in recent months about what the United Nations "was
originally intended to be" have taken no account of the very clear
statements of intent made by the founders or of the logic of the structure
which they founded. All those statements that I have heard have been either
wishful thinking by idealists or an exploitation of wishful thinking by
cynics.

The arguments used by Roosevelt and Churchill to persuade Stalin to take
part in the construction of the United Nations make it crystal clear what
the "original intentions were", and those intentions were systematically
worked out as structures.

At the Yalta Conference (December, 1944) Stalin was distrustful ‹ or
pretended to be ‹ of the American scheme which he had just been shown.
Churchill, having decided to humour Roosevelt by going along with him in
this matter, explained to Stalin why the United Nations projected by
Roosevelt ‹ the United Nations which was actually constructed ‹ was entirely
harmless to Soviet interests. I quote from Volume VI of Churchill's War
History, The Hinge Of Fate:

"I said that, as I understood it, the powers of the World Organisation could
not be used against Britain if she was unconvinced and refused to agree.

"Stalin asked if this was really so, and I assured him it was...

'"My colleagues in Moscow', said Stalin, cannot forget what happened in
December 1939. during the Russo-Finish War, when the British and French used
the League of Nations against us and succeeded in isolating and expelling
the Soviet Union from the League, and when they later mobilised against us
and talked of a crusade against Russia. Cannot we have some guarantees that
this sort of thing will not happen again?' "Mr. Eden pointed out that the
American proposal made it impossible.

"I said that special provision had been made about the unanimity of the
Great Powers...

"Stalin promised to study the plan" (1955, edition, p271/2).

The "Russo-Finnish" war was one of the clearest cases of aggression there
has ever been. Russia wanted a piece of Finnish territory on the Baltic and
offered in exchange for it a piece of Russian territory in the Northern
wastes. Finland refused the offer. The Russian army was sent into Finland to
take what the Kremlin demanded. The Finns, though vastly outnumbered like
the Kuwaitis, unlike the Kuwaitis fought a stiff war of resistance. But,
after many months of fighting, the territory was conquered and was annexed
to Russia.

Instead of suggesting that this territory be returned to Finland as part of
the United Nations settlement, Roosevelt and Churchill assured Stalin that,
under their United Nations scheme, Russia would be placed above the law. It
would be free to engage in acts of aggression whenever it felt its interests
as a Great Power required it, and the mob of states in the United Nations
could not threaten action against it as the mob of states in the League of
Nations had done.

The Russian war against Finland was illegal within the terms of the League
of Nations, but it would not have been illegal if conducted within the
framework of the United Nations. And that, I think, sums up the difference
between the two bodies.

‹

It is pretended in Article 2 of the United Nations Charter that:

"The Organisation is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of its
Members".

That statement is not only a lie, but is an insult to the intelligence of
the world ‹ though perhaps the world, by not nailing the lie, has shown that
it deserved the insult. On the other hand perhaps the world can be excused
for not bothering its head about the lie since the United Nations was until
August of last year [1990 - PB] an institution of little consequence in the
world.

The United Nations, like the Catholic Church, is based on the constitutional
principle that its members are unequal. But while the Church proclaims its
strictly hierarchical character to the world, the United Nations lies about
itself. And in the centuries when the Church exercised hegemony over the
states of the world (at least of the states of Western Christianity) it came
much closer to being the judge in a system of international law than the
United Nations is.

The claim of the United Nations to be the framework of a system of
International Law is groundless because its member states are not equally
subject to law, because five of its member states are placed above the law
by the UN Charter, because those five states invariably break the basic
maxim that nobody should be judge in his own case, and because the five
states which the Charter places above the law of the United Nations have
control of the United Nations as of right.

A system of law needs policing, but its influence is much greater than what
could be achieved by mere power of police. The law is obeyed more because it
is seen to exist than because people fear to break it. Its obvious existence
is the major factor influencing people to obey it. If important people are
seen to break the law with impunity, the moral influence of law is
diminished. If important people are granted certificates of exemption from
the law and are made the judges and policemen for administering the law to
others, then there is no law. And that is the case with the United Nations.




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