Dr. Azab Alaziz Alhashemi

 

The Security Council is the most important United Nations organs and is responsible for keeping international peace and security according to Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, and the Council has legal authority over the governments of the Member States therefore its decisions are considered binding on Member States under Article IV of the Charter of the United Nations. 

The Council consists of (15) members, including five permanent members who have the right to veto and they are the former Soviet Union, China, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, while the other ten members are elected by the General Assembly to be non-permanent members in the Council for periods of two years. They numbered six members, then the number was increased to ten in 1965 when modifying the Charter of the United Nations.

The Cold War is a term used to describe the conflict, tension, and competition that existed between the United States and the Soviet Union and their allies from the mid-forties period until the early nineties, which ended with the arrival of the US president (George W. Bush) to power, and the collapse of the former Soviet Union in 1991, leaving the United States the sole superpower in a mono-polar world.

It is worth mentioning that after the end of the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials until the early last decade of the twentieth-century meaning, the period of the Cold War and beyond, no international criminal courts were originated and no trials held for defendants in international crimes, and this does not mean that there were no international crimes, but in this period by more than the forty years almost, many international crimes were committed, 

 

including the tripartite aggression against Egypt in 1956, and the War of 1967 launched by Israel against Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, and the war in October 1973 between Egypt and Syria, Iraq and Israel, the Vietnam War, the Korean war, and many wars in other regions of the world , and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1978 – 1982, war crimes and crimes against humanity and crimes of genocide that Israel remains committing against the Palestinian people, starting with the massacre of Deir Yassin and Jenin, and Grapes of Wrath Operation and the massacre of Qana and many other crimes in many countries of the world, but we did not find from the international community any hearing ears nor a sense of justice, which would have required to refer the suspects of those crimes to the international criminal court, and the cries of the victims in these crimes  did not move the feelings of the international community or, rather, the great powers, to demand the trial of the perpetrators of these crimes.

However, we found that these feelings have moved rapidly toward the tragic events that took place in the former Yugoslavia in 1991, the international community rose and demanded to punish the perpetrators of international crimes in which it occurred and their trial before the international criminal court created for this purpose in 1993, by a resolution of the UN Security Council.

Then came the massacres and genocide committed against certain groups in Rwanda during internal conflicts that took place in one of the countries of the African continent, which also prompted the international community to punish the perpetrators of these crimes by creating an international criminal court in 1994, the Rwanda Tribunal. These two Tribunals have a temporary structure and their function ends after the completion of the trial of the perpetrators of these crimes, then the International Criminal Court was formed in Sierra Leone in 2002 to prosecute the perpetrators of grave crimes committed against children, which was also a temporary court, while the rest of the international crimes that have occurred and continue to occur in more than one place in the world, 

 

which are no less brutal and cruel than its predecessors, are still waiting for the international community to prosecute the perpetrators in an International permanent Criminal Court, and this is what had been taken by the Rome Statute on the establishment of the International Criminal Court, adopted by the United Nations Diplomatic Conference of Commissioners on July 17, 1998, to achieve criminal justice for all international crimes and their perpetrators.

 

Sources:

It was used as a set of international laws and research.