Annan says US will violate UN Charter if it acts without Approval by Patrick E Tyler & Felicity Barringer The New York Times 3:10pm 13th Mar, 2003   Published March 11, 2003    UNITED NATIONS, March 10 — Secretary General Kofi Annan warned today that if the United States fails to win approval from the Security Council for an attack on Iraq, Washington's decision to act alone or outside the Council would violate the United Nations charter.    "The members of the Security Council now face a great choice," Mr. Annan said in The Hague, where he was trying to broker a United Nations deal on Cyprus. "If they fail to agree on a common position and action is taken without the authority of the Security Council, the legitimacy and support for any such action will be seriously impaired."    Mr. Annan's remarks drew a sharp response from Washington, where the Bush administration, like its allies overseas, was engaged in a strong lobbying effort to win the necessary nine votes to pass a resolution this week authorizing war.    The White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said in a strongly worded retort that "from a moral point of view," if the United Nations fails to support the Bush administration's war aims, it will have "failed to act once again," as it did in Kosovo in the face of persecution of the ethnic Albanians by Serbia and earlier in Rwanda in the face of widespread massacres by Hutus against Tutsis.    Some international legal experts also took issue with Mr. Annan's assertions, arguing that the United States and its coalition partners who ejected Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991 retained the legal authority to take additional action against Baghdad for its failures to live up to the United Nations resolutions that authorized that Persian Gulf war.    Others said that President Bush has nonetheless muddied the legal picture by returning to the Security Council now for a final resolution authorizing war. In this circumstance, they said, it is difficult for Mr. Bush and the international community to ignore a negative vote by the Security Council or a veto by one of its permanent members.    "I just disagree with the secretary general's legal view because there are fundamental Security Council resolutions that underlie this," said Ruth Wedgewood, professor of international law at Johns Hopkins University.    Richard N. Gardner, professor of international law at Columbia University, said that since Saddam Hussein has repeatedly violated the conditions of the 1991 cease-fire, "the United States and other countries revert to their rights to restore peace and security in the area" under the resolution authorizing that war, passed in 1990.    Mr. Annan, whose trip to The Hague also includes presiding over the investiture of the International Criminal Court, which has been opposed by Washington, insisted that "the United Nations — founded to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war — has a duty to search until the very end for the peaceful resolution of conflicts."    Responding to a question on the United Nations Charter, Mr. Annan said the charter is "very clear on circumstances under which force can be used.    "If the U.S. and others were to go outside the Council and take military action, it would not be in conformity with the charter," he said.    United Nations officials said Mr. Annan planned his remarks today to signal to Washington that it needed to consider a compromise that would draw more support on the 15-member Council.    Lawyers here scrambled to support Mr. Annan's remarks, pointing to Chapter 1 of the charter, which says that all members should refrain from the use of force in international relations. Those lawyers also argued that America's new doctrine to make pre-emptive strikes against perceived threats does not conform with Chapter 7, which recognizes the "right of individual or collective" self-defense.    Referring to Mr. Annan, William H. Luers, a former American diplomat who heads the United Nations Association, said, "His job is to defend the U.N. Charter" because it "best defines how nations should behave when it comes to the use of force."    Professor Wedgewood said that even if the United States loses the final vote and proceeds to war, "the failure of this particular resolution" does "not obviate the prior ones," especially since the prior resolutions gave Washington and its allies authority to disarm Iraq for the sake of the peace and security of the region.    The main point, she said, "is that we've been there before." She cited the case of Kosovo, when the Clinton administration bypassed the Security Council — where Russia was threatening to veto any military action — and used NATO as its instrument to lead the bombing of Yugoslavia.    Professor Gardner agreed that the authority existed in previous resolutions and said he was confident as an international lawyer that Mr. Bush has the authority he needs, "but we are now in a situation where there are certain ambiguities."    He continued, "I am very uneasy about going to war at this stage without authority from the Council" because the Council is divided on the question of whether all efforts by the United Nations weapons inspectors to disarm Iraq peacefully have been exhausted.    At the same time, Professor Gardner said that Mr. Bush had engendered a great deal of confusion by asserting American rights under a new national security doctrine of pre-emptive attack.    "Of course this sounds good," he said. "But it leaves us in a world where every country is self-judging what it does, and that leads to world anarchy. Hitler used national security when he invaded Czechoslovakia, and Russia did the same in its aggressions. I am not one of these purists on this subject, but the search for legitimacy has to be taken seriously."    Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company Visit the related web page
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