Point of Order: Buzz from the Beehive - 25/10/23

Gaza again gives our govt something to announce – this time, it is calling for a humanitarian pause

Gaza is the focus of the first statement posted on the government’s official website since October 17, when the focus was … Gaza.

Is anything governmental happening on the home front?

Ron Smith: Iran - the End Game

Sometime in the next couple of weeks there will be an agreement announced at the end of more than 18 months of talks between Iran and the P5+1 group of nations (the permanent members of the Security Council, plus Germany).  

The crucial central question concerns the extent to which Iran will be permitted to retain its on-going nuclear weapons programme.  How much will it retain of its uranium enrichment capability (and stockpile of enriched material) from which it could make weapons of the sort that fell on Hiroshima?  And to what extent will it be allowed to continue with its programme to produce weapons-grade plutonium (the basis of the bomb that fell on Nagasaki)?

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: The rule of international law – have we turned a corner?

September 2013 may well go down in the history books of tomorrow as one of the most historic months in world history. This was the month when international law stared down a challenge from the Wild West style of gunboat diplomacy, and set the Middle East, and thereby the world, on an overdue new path with regard to geopolitical conflict resolution.

All right, perhaps I am putting it a bit too optimistically. But it has certainly been an exciting month for people interested in that hitherto largely toothless tiger international law, not to mention observers of the great geopolitical chess game. And it has been a delightful month for the latter, as they have been watching a Grand Master running circles around an ostentatious rank novice.

Ron Smith: Collective Security and the Responsibility to Protect

The United Nations was established in 1945 primarily as a collective security organisation, with an ancillary aspiration towards the security of individuals. This is reflected in the opening words of the Prologue to the Charter. In latter years, this broader aspiration towards human security has been reflected in the formal adoption by the General Assembly of the policy report ‘Responsibility to Protect’. This envisaged collective intervention in cases of oppression or genocide but the notion has always been in tension with the fundamental Charter principle of ‘non-interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states’.

The project of suppressing aggression has never worked well. Notwithstanding nearly seventy years of aggression, of one sort or another, there have been only two examples of UN action (Korea and Iraq) and both of these depended on an international fluke. In the first case, the Soviet Union was engaged in a boycott of the UN over the non-seating of mainland China and was thus unable to veto the Korean intervention. The 1990 decision to oppose the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait corresponded to the brief honeymoon which followed the collapse of communism. The present UN ‘RTP’ intervention in Libya is also very likely to prove to have been a one-off. Prominent members of the Security Council are either luke-warm, or passively antagonistic.

Ron Smith: Libya and Colonel Gaddafi: second thoughts

When I last wrote on this subject (4 March), the Libyan opposition was in full cry and making progress on all fronts. Colonel Gaddafi, on the other hand, was exhibiting panic and making incoherent speeches. His diplomatic representatives were deserting him and his airmen were defecting or, so it seemed, not always aiming well. The military forces of the leadership still had the potential to be decisive if they were used ruthlessly but the crucial factor of morale was all with the insurgents.