The Authority of the UN Security Council & Concrete Examples

The Authority of the UN Security Council
Name
Institution
The Authority of the UN Security Council
Introduction
The Security Council is the arm of the United Nations that is tasked with ensuring that there is international peace and security. This is the only body existent within the UN that has the authority to act in defense of the mutual security needs of the international society. This is inclusive of the ability to take military action to implement its decisions. The Security Council was formulated in 1945 as something like the executive committee of the big nations to ensure that the order that they were trying to build after the Second World War was not threatened (Hurd, 2013). The Charter chapters that delineate the authority of the Council develop new and forceful duties for nations that join the United Nations. The Security Council legal hierarchy goes against the sovereign equality of states that is provided in Article 2(1) of the UN Charter.
According to Article 2(1) of the UN Charter, all member states of the UN have sovereignty equality with all the other members. This means that no nation represented in the UN can assume to have more powers than any other nation or to make any decision on behalf of the other nation. The United Nations tries to stress this clause especially when there are important decisions to be made regarding the security of member states. Despite this, the Security Council has the legal powers to go against the recommendations of Article 2(1). This means that the Security Council body has the authority to make a decision to invade another nation and still be termed to be within the law (Hurd, 2013).
The members of the United Nations surrender a large portion of their legal independence to the Security Council. According to Article 25 of the Charter, the United Nations agrees to recognize and implement the resolutions taken by the Security Council. This is further outlined in Article 49 of the Charter where it agrees to help in any way to realize the decisions taken by the Security Council. In Article 103, the United Nations states that in the event that the recommendations of the Security Council and the United Nations collide at any time, then the Security Council Charter will prevail. This is especially seen when the Security Council takes the decision to wage war against any other nations for any reason. The Security Nations are so binding to an extent that they are implemented against even nations that do not agree with the decisions taken by the Council. Together, these obligations mean that every UN member is legally bound by the decisions taken by the Council and that there are no channels through which they can evade that legal subordination apart from withdrawing its membership from the body. When it was initially formed, the Security Council was solely meant to check states but over the years this has been expanded to include individuals. The main purpose of the Security Council is to ensure that terrorist groups do not mushroom in any state thus threatening the peace of any people (Malone, 2004).
The Charter’s acceptance brought in a novel global legal system, one where the existent UN members are legally bound by the Security Council precepts to a striking degree. This does not however mean that the states are expected to automatically agree with the obligations. In order to ensure that the nations stick to the Council guidelines, it uses political persuasion as well as the threat for military action. The military action option is rarely taken but its possibility lingers in the background and aids in activating the Council’s political authority (Malone, 2004).
The Security Council is both a legal actor and a political forum and for that reason the aspects of ensuring that states comply has both legal and political facets. The legal component of the Council’s powers is derived from the Charter articles that give the Council absolute power over member states on the decisions taken by the Council in the area of peace and security. The legal powers are huge and for that reason are hard to put into perspective. They are usually met with great resistance by the nations against that they are used or nations that may fear the precedent that their use may trigger. This means that there are very few instances where the Council is forced to use its full power against a nation. This has left the use of the Council’s authority as a tool that shifts political grounds of a conflict among nations. In such instances, the threat of enforcement is very much alive but is delegated to the background of the conflict and the observance of nations is attained (Malone, 2004).
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