The conditions of membership in the U.N. are specified in the U.N. Charter. Specifically, “Articles 5 and 6 of the Charter of the United Nations deal respectively with suspension of rights and privileges of membership, and with expulsion from the United Nations.” But the operative part is Article 6, which reads:
A Member of the United Nations which has persistently violated the Principles contained in the present Charter may be expelled from the Organization by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council.”
Israel certainly qualifies, but the United States Government, which is controlled by the anti-Shia and anti-Iran alliance between Israel’s Government providing the anti-Iran lobbyists and propagandists, and the Saudi Government providing the anti-Iran bribe-money, won’t allow that. Consequently, no matter how violative of the U.N. Charter Israel is, it cannot be expelled.
The United States Government likewise is routinely violating the U.N. Charter and cannot be expelled, because this very Government is on the U.N.’s own Security Council as one of the five permanent members: it would veto its own expulsion.
Consequently, a fatal flaw in the current U.N. Charter is that no vote by the U.N. General Assembly can expel a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council. Nor can they expel any member of the General Assembly that’s backed by one or more members of the permanent Security Council.
Until this situation is changed and a stated percentage of the votes from the General Assembly can expel a member from the U.N. General Assembly, there can be no international accountability applied against a member of the U.N. Security Council permanent five nations; and the U.S. Government, being a member of that, will continue to be allowed to do whatever its Saudi and Israeli masters want it to do — thereby protecting both Israel and Saudi Arabia themselves, and giving each of those two masters virtually as much freedom-of-action as the U.S. has; the U.S. Government’s masters buy impunity, indirectly, from their protector.
This is not a world of international law; it is a world of international force — basically a world of conquest and submission (and subversion can be part of that), which mocks democracy internationally (and maybe even domestically), and therefore effectively corrupts and prevents democracy within all nations that the controlling masters in Saudi Arabia and in Israel demand.
The most fatal failure of the U.N. Charter is thus it’s prohibiting any amendment that one of the five permanent Security Council members opposes.
The issue of what the conditions would be for amending the U.N. Charter was debated while the U.N. Charter was being drawn up in 1945, but nothing effective was agreed to, and so the U.N’s PR on the matter states only that “the question of future amendments to the Charter received much attention and finally resulted in an agreed solution.”
They don’t say what that “solution” was, but there have been no controversial amendments made to the Charter, during its 73 years, so whatever it might have been was almost totally ineffective. A web-search for “U.N. Charter” plus “proposed amendment” produces no major “proposed amendment” but does, near the top, show what that (obviously failed) “agreed solution” (which the U.N. tries to hide) was; and it is:
This concession took the form of Articles 108 and 109 concerning Charter review procedures.
While Article 108 describes the required steps for making specific amendments, Article 109 introduces the option of a review conference outside of the usual General Assembly (GA) meetings with the purpose of a comprehensive “review” of the Charter.
Both these avenues for making changes to the UN Charter include the criteria of two-thirds of the UN member states voting for and ratifying a proposed amendment.
However, in addition, “all the permanent members of the Security Council” must also ratify before the amendment goes into force. This unanimous concurrence of the P5 [the five permanent members] is the biggest challenge to adopting any amendment to the UN Charter.”
In other words: The U.N. Charter’s colossal (and thus-far fatal) failure was in its including the 5-member permanent Security Council’s veto-provision to apply even to any proposed amendment to the Charter. Only an amendment which all five permanent members support can pass. Here is such an amendment.
No matter how much of the rest of the world want a particular change to be made, it can’t be done unless all five of the permanent members of the Security Council will accept it. This is the harmful dictatorial power that the five permanents were granted, but it can be eliminated without eliminating the Security Council itself (as will be discussed later here).
Consequently: In order to boot Israel or any other international rogue-nation out of the U.N., an amendment would first be needed, which would apply a degree of accountability to each member of the U.N. permanent Security Council, by stripping the provision that inappropriately applies their veto-power even over the consideration of any proposed amendment.
Obviously: amending the Charter should be a matter for consideration only by the General Assembly — without any veto-power being held by any one nation. Amendment isn’t regular U.N. action: it concerns the Charter itself.
The biggest difference between a religious Scripture and a democratic constitution (such as the U.N. Charter was intended to be for the entire world) is that whereas the former (Scripture) includes no provision for its being amended, the latter (a democratic constitution) does — or else it instead is actually a religious Scripture, something to be taken only on faith, no democracy at all, nothing suitable for the Age of Science, and thus for a future of democracy.
This faith-basis being the actual epistemological status of the U.N. Charter — unless and until its amendment-section becomes itself amended to what it needs to be — that Charter is a religious Scripture, and the U.N. is more a religion than a democracy of any kind, so long as there exists any nation that can veto any proposed change to the founding document.
Though intended to be the emerging democratic constitution for the future world, the existing U.N. Charter is instead just a type of religion, and this is its Scripture. (Though, as noted, uncontroversial amendments may be considered in it; so, the U.N. isn’t fully a religious institution.)
Consequently, to address these problems, I propose that the members of the U.N. Security Council that wish to establish through the U.N. a democracy and transform the U.N. so as to abandon its current status as being a religion, push, at the U.N., relentlessly, for a measure to unlock the U.N. Charter — to enable it finally to be significantly amended and allow a two-thirds vote of the General Assembly to pass into international law as an Amendment to the emerging global Constitution, the no longer religion, but instead henceforth the democracy, of an unlocked Charter of the United Nations — thereby causing the existing Scripture to be henceforth a Constitution.
Unless and until this (the introduction of the General Assembly’s exclusive ability to amend the Charter) is done, there can be no progress, only continued regress to international dictatorship and a World War III, and so in the direction of even more global dictatorship — this time likely ending in global extermination (precisely what the U.N. was intended to avoid).
Any member of the Security Council who would oppose removing that provision — the veto-power’s extending even to any proposed amendment to the Charter — would be clearly an international pariah-Government and enemy of democracy, which all the rest of the world could then boycott and penalize outside the U.N. until that pariah-nation becomes defeated economically and thus effectively becomes coerced by economic means to become a decent member-state in the international community.
This is an existential issue for the future of a livable planet. A basic condition for progress is the elimination, from the Charter, of the clause:
including all the permanent members of the Security Council.”
08. Amendments to the present Charter shall come into force for all Members of the United Nations when they have been adopted by a vote of two-thirds of the members of the General Assembly and ratified in accordance with their respective [individual national] constitutional processes by two-thirds of the Members of the United Nations, including all the permanent members of the Security Council.”
“109:2. Any alteration of the present Charter recommended by a two-thirds vote of the conference shall take effect when ratified in accordance with their respective constitutional processes by two thirds of the Members of the United Nations including all the permanent members of the Security Council.”
The five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council are: China, France, Russia, UK, and U.S. U.S. would try to block removal of that phrase “including all the permanent members of the Security Council.”
On 14 May 2018, Russia’s Sputnik News bannered “UK Has no Plans to Move Embassy to Jerusalem, Disagrees With US on Issue – May”, and this indicates that the U.S. well might be the only member that would fight to block democratization of the U.N. — to unlock the Charter for all U.N. members.
The precipitating event for this call for correcting the Charter would be the virtually unanimous repugnance of the entire world other than the U.S., regarding Israel’s string of brazen in-your-face violations of the Charter and of much of international law.
Taking advantage of this intense global outrage — plus of the many outrageous actions by the U.S. Government itself — provides a rare opportunity to make the long-delayed but essential reform of the U.N., as follows:
America is the only member, of the five permanent members of the Security Council, that is so under the boot of Israel and of the Sauds.
America is controlled by its own aristocracy, which are heavily interlocked with those of Israel and especially of Saudi Arabia and its other vassals, such as UAE but more broadly including the Gulf Cooperation Council of Arabic fundamentalist-Sunni royal families — and that includes a large portion of the world’s wealth.
The American portion of that Imperial alliance includes control over many of the world’s largest consumer-brands, and is thus (unlike either of its masters) especially highly vulnerable to international public-image problems, such as any consumer boycotts.
There might be a way to save the world. This might be the way to a progressive future, reversing the worst of what has happened after the death of FDR (who, more than any other person, laid the groundwork for the U.N.).
Though the U.S. Government might succeed in winning the UK’s support to block democratization of the U.N., such boycotts might produce a democratic victory, if not immediately, then still within a reasonably short time, such as happened when apartheid was removed from South Africa.
But this victory would be not only for the Palestinians — it would be for all peoples everywhere — a world moving in the direction of international democracy, no longer like now, in the direction of increased international dictatorship.
Top Photo | Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrives at the United Nations General Assembly at U.N. headquarters, Sept. 19, 2017. (AP/Seth Wenig)
Eric Zuesse is an investigative historian and author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
The Duran is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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