The UN Charter: Disappointment

This is an adjusted translation of my Ukrainian article.

When I started reading the Charter of the United Nations, I hoped to see there some commandments for the resolution of international conflicts. Some general rules that could be followed regardless of time and continent. Unfortunately I was disappointed.

Security Council rules us all

The beginning of the Charter promises a lot. The preamble and the first chapter (i.e. Article 1 and 2) are well written — about international peace, cooperation, avoiding wars and the like. But you’d better not read further. Most of the Charter is various legal details such as who votes and how, what is expected from such a document. But apart from that, everything boils down to two points:

Let’s live peacefully
If it is not possible to live peacefully, then the Security Council will decide everything.

There are no other moral guidelines. Except for the Article 51, which directly says that in the event of an attack on the state, it has the right to defend itself. It seems that this is the only clearly stated rule in the entire Charter. Paradoxically, Russia says that it attacked Ukraine according to this very article. That is, the only normal rule and that was misused.

The entire Charter is very strictly tied to the fact that the only body that really decides something is the Security Council. There are no normal systems of checks and balances there. If we add to this that five states have the right of veto during voting (Article 27.3), then it turns out to be an oligarchy rather than a democracy. I was unpleasantly surprised that when the Charter was written, the authors did not see this, because it burns out the eyes with its limitation and short-sightedness.

The right of veto exists in five states — the USA, Great Britain, France, China and the USSR. That’s right — USSR. Not only is Russia illegally sitting there instead of the USSR, China is also not the same as before [1]. That China that was once in the Security Council is now in Taiwan. That is, two states with the right of veto out of five in the Security Council are there on dubious grounds.

In general, the UN Charter does not resolve any dilemmas — such as what to do when a sovereign state has decided to commit genocide on its territory, whether it is possible to invade the territory of a state to provide the population with protection from a dictator, what to do in the event of civil wars, how to resolve the issue of disputed territories and what is more important — sovereignty of the state or the right of nations to self-determination. Nothing is said about whether a nation has the right to conduct military operations on the territory of another state, if it itself has been attacked. Or what to do with the membership of the state, if there was a military coup in the country, the state was divided into parts, or a large part of the state was conquered. These issues, and even then not all, are decided by the UN Security Council — this is the position of the Charter.

Anachronisms in the Charter

The UN Charter was clearly written as a temporary document to regulate the situation in the world after the Second World War. This can explain such a strange composition of permanent members of the Security Council, in which South America and Africa are completely absent, and Asia is represented only by communist China, but not by democratic India.

Such anachronisms in the UN Charter look to me like rotten fruit in an already sour compote. For example, the UN Charter directly talks about so-called “enemy states”, where such states mean all states that fought against UN members during the Second World War (Article 53.2). According to the Charter, Japan, Germany and Italy are enemy states. And Article 107 talks about the responsibility of these “enemy states” before normal, UN states. It seems that other states should never be responsible for waging wars.

In the Charter, a relatively large piece of text mentions long-defunct trust territories (Articles 75–91). Colonies are also briefly mentioned there (Chapter 11).

It is necessary to understand that the world looked completely different then. Almost all of Africa was colonized, mainly by Britain and France. No small island state was a member of the UN, and in general less than fifty states were the first members of the UN. It seemed that it was a kind of closed club of winners who had to decide the fate of the rest of the world. The organization, which was fresh at the time, soured over time. And it is still not fully understood how Ukraine, Belarus and the USSR were simultaneously members of the UN, but not Kazakhstan, Russia or Georgia, for example. There was a strange situation there from the very beginning.

If the UN was created as a replacement for the League of Nations, and not as a temporary organization to solve the post-war situation, then its creators should have been a little more prudent. Did they really think that in say two hundred years the only peaceful states will be the USSR, China, the USA, Britain and France, which have the right to decide the fate of the world? And this — is not a hindsight bias position. We have precedents for writing documents that have been valid for hundreds of years. A good example is the US Constitution.

The UN can issue good documents — for example, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [2], which became the basis for many other similar documents, including the Ukrainian Constitution. Unfortunately, the UN Charter does not belong to such well written documents.

[1] China in Security Council: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_General_Assembly_Resolution_2758

[2] UDHR: https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights

World Map taken from: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Decolonization_-_World_In_1945_en.svg, Public Domain