Stop deferring responsibilities to the UN! It is constitutionally dysfunctional.
I love Pope Francis but he’s seriously wrong in this part of his message.
The problematic part is this paragraph:
“I call on powerful countries to stop aggression, blockades and unilateral sanctions against any country anywhere on earth. No to neo-colonialism. Conflicts must be resolved in multilateral fora such as the United Nations. We have already seen how unilateral interventions, invasions and occupations end up; even if they are justified by noble motives and fine words.”
There are three problems here, but interconnected to one: the lack of any legally rational objective definition of statehood in international law now.
It’s probably meant to be implied that international sanctions against the Assad regime, not against Syria, the people, are ‘unilateral’ because they weren’t and could not ever be agreed by the UN as it is now. That argument is wrong and can be too easily misused by those who want to use it as endorsement of the Assad regime and their narratives and worldview.
Tragically, Pope Francis has made this mistake before.
I am thoroughly convinced that it’s a sincere misunderstanding with no bad intention, but nonetheless very effective at perpetuating unjust suffering.
“[U]nilateral sanctions against any country… must be resolved in multilateral fora such as the United Nations” falsely presupposes that..
a) the ‘state’ which claims to exist for a country is representative and legitimate for the people of that country, which is most often not the case,
b) the UN is structurally capable of functioning according to its Charter purposes, which tragically is not the case either, as neither the UNSC nor UNGA R.377 ‘Uniting for Peace’ procedures actually work, ever.
The UN’s almost total dysfunctionality throughout all its different agencies and areas of work is entirely consistent and predictable, as it is essentially an inter-state institution without any legally rational definition of a ‘state’.
‘Statehood’ currently consists of mutual recognition by other ‘states’, which is a self-referential loop with no objective criteria in the outside world.
Most ‘states’ in the UN are not really independent voting members but are more dependent on their patron ‘state’ or regime in the P5 for supply of international legitimation than on legitimation by the people whom they claim as subjects or citizens, and it's more frequent globally that ‘states’ are acting for their patron state or regime’s oligarchic business associates than for their supposed citizens’ common good. So they’re neither sovereign nor representative nor legitimate, but they have voting powers in the UN.
Legitimizing the UN as a forum for resolving conflicts and building peace, as it actually is now, effectively means confirming always bystanding to mass atrocities, which have been committed more or less by powerful states or regimes on both sides of the democratic to authoritarian spectrum, but actually much more now by the regimes on the authoritarian side.
It’s true the USG in its foundation time committed mass atrocities on a scale rivalling the USSR’s, used anti-Communist and ‘War on Terror’ framing narratives rhetorically in domestic politics to explain away post-colonial exploitation and domination, and still is systemically racist, and mostly viciously unaware of that, but if you compare the actions and statements of intent from the opposite states or regimes, mostly allied around Putin as their head now, they are really even worse, by several orders of magnitude.
As long as we make conflict resolution and peace building dependent on the UN as a structure we will not get there, because the P5 members mutually assure that the UNSC will remain deadlocked such that they can each get away with doing whatever they like without any effective legal restraints, by not following the Charter obligation to recuse themselves from decisions when they’re involved as a belligerent (or backing one of the belligerents or using them as proxy armed forces), and by not refusing to accept UNSC procedures as valid when the other side of the P5 is also misusing their veto power by voting when they’re involved as a belligerent.
We still badly need something like the UN but actually functional according to its stated purposes, but the UN is not that and never can be until it gets a legally rational objective definition of statehood inserted into its constitutional law or Charter, and that definition must start with recognising that human rights exist naturally prior to any putative state’s claims to representativeness or legitimacy, and state representativeness and legitimacy are absolutely contingent on actual practice of human rights and never, anywhere the other way around. There must not be any exceptions.
Any putative state which claims statehood but refuses to recognise the primacy of inherent human dignity as a natural fact and hence of rationally universally existing human rights as moral obligations, on any and every sort of socially or politically conventional entity and their legitimacy claims, is a priori rationally invalid, cannot exist as such, is null and void as a ‘state’, and its ‘statehood’ should be treated as non-existent throughout international law. It should not be allowed a place in any international legal institution, nor allowed to make any claims on such procedures.
The burden of proof in international law for statehood should be on the one who claims it to forensically justify their claims to independence, representativeness and legitimacy, to the public and international judiciary, not on the people who it claims as its subjects. In the absence of sufficient public forensic evidence, all statehood claims should be presumed invalid.
Rather than rely on executive governments to test each other’s statehood claims, there should be a universal procedure of referring claims to international judiciary to test them objectively against legal criteria. Only if a ‘state’ passes all three categories of legal tests should it be recognized as one.
‘States’ have done so much harm since the invention of the ‘nation-state’ idea in the 1700s it would be better to invalidate them all than assume them valid until proven otherwise. I do think a truly independent, representative, legitimate state is possible, but as the most powerful conventional social entity in our legal system it should be held to the strictest possible standards.
The UN sounds like a nice idea, but when you look into the details and see how it works in practice, it isn’t actually a good thing now. Please stop deferring responsibilities to the UN as if it does what it’s supposed to.
There are Catholic pseudo-charities involved in Syria supposedly giving humanitarian aid but actually collaborating with the regime, e.g. SOS Chrétien d’Orient, which has misdirected charitable funds to a Christian pro-Assad militia which has committed mass atrocities incl. against civilians, and infiltrates Catholic networks in Europe with pro-Assad disinformation. Unless we actively background check sources before believing the content of any messages, any of us could be honestly misled.
To the Vatican Diplomatic Corps — please learn how to background check sources properly in today’s world — go to specialists in this for training. If you can’t catch up with how fluid and fast the global network is now and how complex it is to check what information is coming from where, retire. Let someone of a younger generation and with more apt education do it.
Continuing to assume that Catholics or Catholic organizations are trustworthy is an irrational bias, and has led us into scandalous iniquities before, e.g. the supply of recommendation letters to the Red Cross for resettlement papers which many Nazis used to escape prosecution, largely to Argentina, where their influence contributed to the Videla regime.
