Free Republic

President Obama’s Monday night speech on the “kinetic military activity” in Libya revealed that he has fully accepted the faddish “responsibility to protect” (R2P) rationale for military intervention abroad. Unfortunately, this action is not just a direct attack on Libya’s state sovereignty, but also on America’s. R2P - sounding a bit like a droid from Star Wars - is a school of thought that developed in response to the propensity of some regimes to commit crimes against their own people and the reticence of the international community to take decisive action. “Responsibility to protect,” however, lacks the firm legal basis...

Fifty years ago today, the life work of Alger Hiss came to fruition. Hiss, a US State Department official, served the United Nations as its acting Secretary General during its founding conference in the spring of 1945. On October 24, 1945 the United Nations Charter became effective as a majority of the countries that had signed it ratified their signatures. Several years later, Hiss went to a federal penitentiary for committing perjury when testifying that he was not a Soviet agent. His personal career was over, but his most important work, the United Nations, lived on. Globalists everywhere are today...

The opening round in the court-martial of 1st Lt. Ehren Watada could be key to defense hopes of putting the Iraq war on trial along with this Fort Lewis Army officer who refused to deploy to Iraq. At a pretrial hearing today, Watada's attorneys will try to persuade a military judge that they should be allowed to argue that the war is illegal, in part because it violates military regulations that wars be fought in accordance with the United Nations charter. That stance is crucial to the defense of Watada, who faces charges of missing a troop movement and conduct...

/begin my excerpt U.S. Under Secretary of State, "N. Korean nuclear test to be met with tough military actions" Robert Joseph, U.S. Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security remarked on Sept. 28(U.S. time), "If N. Korea goes ahead with nuclear test, U.N. Security Council will be firmly in favor of taking strong measures against N. Korea." Under Secretary Joseph made the comment in a special interview with Voice of America, while warning N. Korea, "It would be a grave strategic blunder for N. Korea to actually carry out nuclear test." He explained, "It will be followed...

In the Herbst Theater auditorium in San Francisco, delegates from 50 nations sign the United Nations Charter, establishing the world body as a means of saving "succeeding generations from the scourge of war." The Charter was ratified on October 24, and the first U.N. General Assembly met in London on January 10, 1946. Despite the failure of the League of Nations in arbitrating the conflicts that led up to World War II, the Allies as early as 1941 proposed establishing a new international body to maintain peace in the postwar world. The idea of the United Nations began to be...

To: President Bush Dear President Bush, We, the citizens of the United States of America, demand that the US Government fully recognize the legality of the Israeli communities situated in the West Bank and Gaza. The following declarations in support of the Jewish communities situated in the West Bank and must be made prior to the upcoming November elections. Settlements are Not Illegal! 1. The settlements are not located in "occupied territory." The last binding international legal instrument which divided the territory in the region of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza was the League of Nations Mandate, which explicitly...

Speaking in 1970, former UN Secretary-General U Thant praised founding Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin and pointedly claimed that Lenin’s ruling philosophy was "in line with the aims of the UN Charter." One of Lenin’s most important concepts was "democratic centralism," that is, the notion that the ruling Soviet elite embodied the democratic will of its subject population, and thus whatever it did was legitimate. In his Foreign Affairs essay (see story above), Tharoor unconsciously acknowledges the UN’s Leninist legacy. "As the world’s preeminent international organization, the UN embodies world opinion, or at least the world’s legally constituted states," asserts Tharoor....

CHAPTER V THE SECURITY COUNCIL -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- COMPOSITION Article 23 The Security Council shall consist of fifteen Members of the United Nations. The Republic of China, France, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the United States of America shall be permanent members of the Security Council. The General Assembly shall elect ten other Members of the United Nations to be non-permanent members of the Security Council, due regard being specially paid, in the first instance to the contribution of Members of the United Nations to the maintenance of international peace and...

<p>LISBON, Portugal, Aug. 31 (UPI) -- The International Association of Lawyers, or UAI, is calling for an overhaul of the charter of the United Nations.</p> <p>During the group's 47th congress in Lisbon, officials said the U.N. charter is outdated and unable to respond to the challenges of the 21st century, the BBC reported Sunday.</p>

Instead of voicing his disapproval of the US invasion of Iraq, Kofi Annan should tender his resignation as secretary-general of the UN. In so doing, he will set a precedent for future secretaries-general in the event that the UN charter is violated by any permanent member of the Security Council. If he remains in power, he will not be able to look anybody in the eye.

U.S. Seeks March 17 Deadline for Iraq By DAFNA LINZER Associated Press Writer UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- With a quarter-million troops poised to swarm into Iraq, the United States and its allies moved to set March 17 as the final deadline for Saddam Hussein to prove he has given up his weapons of mass destruction. The ultimatum, in the form of a U.S.-backed resolution, hands the Security Council a new and immediate challenge: Vote in favor of a resolution that provides a 10-day window for an alternative to war or risk being left on the sidelines as the Bush administration...

Quite a few conservatives, particularly neoconservatives, agree that President Bush has made the case for attacking Iraq. President Bush has obtained Congressional approval as well as the support of a U.N. Security Resolution to proceed with action against Iraq if Iraq does not comply with U.N. inspection and disarmament requests. Yet there are a few conservatives, including Bush's own Secretary of Defense, Colin Powell, who believe the U.S. should not start a war with Iraq, even if Saddam fails to comply completely with disarmanent and weapons inspection. There are intriguing arguments on both sides. Iraq has flaunted requests for weapons...