Ethos STOA Sourcebook Template

Applicability: The case for veto reform could be run many ways. I have tried to make this brief applicable to all cases that change the veto power in some way or another. All of the links for the DA’s are specific to any change in the Council veto power.

Unilateralism Solvency: If the affirmative argues that the veto empowers US unilateralism, use solvency takeout B. It is a fairly common argument in the literature. Just be aware of the fact that this is an apparent contradiction between this argument and disadvantage 2. There are ways of preserving the unique of the DA without losing the solvency argument, but I’ll leave those resolutions to you.

Israel DA: For Israel DA, the link story is that the US is the only one vetoing resolutions. If there is any alternation to the veto, the US cannot protect Israel from UN censure. This weakens Israel’s ability to protect its own security. Alternatively, one could argue that Israel will perceive that their security is compromised. Due to the brink, there needs to be only a perception of threat for Israel to focus their resources on protection. The impacts serve more as specific links into certain impact scenarios, but those scenarios should be easy to card and you most likely will not need to go that deep in the debate.

P-5 Backlash DA: The P5 backlash DA is almost self-explanatory. When you take away political privileges, there will be a natural political backlash. Regardless of whether or not the veto reform actually reduces the power of the veto (which it should if the affirmative team wants to access any advantages), the importance is that the P5 will be inclined to disengage from the Council.

(A2 = Answer to, K2 = Key to)

Page 1 of 23 Ethos NCFCA Sourcebook

NEG – UNSC Veto Reform 2012-2013

Solvency Takeouts

A. A2: Veto = genocide

1. Unwilling big powers led to Bosnian atrocities

Council created safe areas without providing any trained troop support for them

Joanna Weschler (UN representative for Human Rights Watch; former reporter for Solidarity Union; former Poland researcher for Helsinki Watch; former Brazil researcher for Americas Watch; former Director of HRW’s Prison Project) “Human Rights,” 2004, in The UN Security Council: From the Cold War to the 21 st Century (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers) [Ethos]

“In 1995 another human rights disaster occurred under close UN watch. Council-created “safe areas” in Bosnia were overrun by the Serb forces, and thousands of male inhabitants were forcefully removed and then slaughtered. Particularly appalling were the events in Srebrenica, where the Dutch UN peacekeeping battalion not only did not attempt to protect the local population but also forced the civilians who had sought refuge in the UN compound in Potocari out of the compound and straight into the hands of the awaiting Serbs. Several thousand men and boys were subsequently taken away by the Serbs and never seen again. To have created the so-called safe areas without providing them with adequate military protection was probably one of the most serious and fatal mistakes in the history of the Council The big powers, under pressure from public opinion, had wanted to appear resolute in addressing the massive human rights violations. But unwilling to put their troops at risk, they had not been resolute enough to back their words with soldiers and resources. In essence, they used Security Council resolutions as fig leaves to cover their inaction.”

2. Multiple problems in Bosnia

Despite resolutions and peacekeeping force, war dragged on for three years

Mats Berdal (Professor of security and development in the Department of War Studies at King’s College, London ; former director of studies at the International Institute for Strategic Studies; former research fellow of St. Anthony’s College, Oxford University; PhD, Oxford University) 2004, “Bosnia” in The UN Security Council: From the Cold War to the 21st Century (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers) [Ethos]

“The Security Council’s handling of the war in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995 remains one of the most controversial of all its efforts to deal with violent conflict in the international system after the Cold War. In spite of numerous resolutions and the presence of a large-scale peacekeeping force on the ground, a savage and merciless war persisted, albeit at varying levels of intensity, for more than three years. When the war finally did come to an end, it was only after a bloody denouement that included the fall, at a terrible cost in human lives, of what the Council had earlier designated the ‘safe area’ of Srebrenica.”

3. Rwanda failure result of broader failings

Great powers unwilling to spend money or make long term commitments

Howard Adelman (Professor of philosophy at York University ; founder and former director of Centre for Refugee Studies; Ph.D. in philosophy, University of Toronto ), Astri Suhrke (senior research fellow at the Chr. Michelsen Institute ; Research Associate for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; PhD in International Relations, University of Denver) 2004, “Bosnia” in The UN Security Council: From the Cold War to the 21st Century (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers) [Ethos]

“The Rwanda case invites further reflection on the material, institutional, and normative boundaries that support, but also limit, the operations of the Council in this type of situation. Whether or not one agrees with Thomas Weiss’s argument in this volume on the emergence of a “humanitarian impulse” with respect to victims of war (see Chapter 3), this chapter deals with the failure to prevent such victimization in the first place, partially because of what Weiss himself describes as the UN’s demonstrated inability to conduct enforcement operations and the unwillingness by major powers to spend money, matched by an unwillingness to run risks. Others in the volume (e.g., Steven Ratner, Chapter 37) have noted if not celebrated the role of the Security Council in creating new rules in international law, as in establishing care crimes tribunals in civil wars, in interpreting the UN Charter in a robust way (the Kurds in Iraq, Haiti, etc.), and most significant, as being a catalyst for others to assume responsibility for international law in areas of security. Yet if the Security Council can serve in raising the international moral and legal standards higher, it can serve to lower them as well. The Rwanda case highlights the role of the Council in undermining international law by narrowing the interpretation of the Genocide Convention. Furthermore, by not asserting its role in the area of preventive diplomacy (Chapter VI), and by adopting a passive and contingent role in relation to security (Chapter VII), the Council failed in its promotional role in relation to the UN Charter as a whole. Only after the genocide was incontestably a fact did the Security Council try to reverse itself. Although authorizing reengagement and a new force in May 1994 (the so-called UNAMIR II), the Council had missed a critical opportunity to clarify the legal and moral responsibilities of states in relation to genocide.”

B. US is the Honey Badger (Will circumvent, veto or no).

1. US circumvents UNSC resolutions

Illegitimately used UN resolutions to justify 1990 occupation of Kuwait

John Quigley, (Professor of Law, Ohio State University ; former research scholar at Moscow State University; former research associate in comparative law at Harvard University Law School ; Ohio State University Distinguished Scholar Award (1995) ; LL.B., M.A. from Harvard University) “The United Nations Security Council: Promethean protector or helpless hostage?,” Spring 2000 , Texas International Law Journal 35.2, 129-172. [Ethos]

“ The United States has also evaded Charter structures on the use of force in the post-Cold War period by acting unilaterally in purported implementation of a Security Council resolution, but where the relevant resolution does not support the action taken. The United States has acted against Iraq in this fashion in five instances, all of them connected with Iraq's 1990 occupation of Kuwait and its aftermath: (a) a bombing campaign in 1998 against Iraq; (b) missile attacks on southern Iraq in 1996; (c) the maintenance beginning in 1991 of air interdiction zones over Iraq; (d) air strikes in 1999 aimed at containing Iraq from military action against its neighbors; and (e) military action against Iraq in early 1991. In each instance, as will be recounted in this section, the United States claimed to be acting on the basis of Security Council resolutions, but, in fact, the cited resolutions did not support the action. ”

2. US dominant actor displacing UN

US extending security umbrella leads nations to accept US influence. US system is stronger than UN.

Kenneth Anderson (Professor of Law, Washington College of Law, American University; Research Fellow, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and member of the Hoover Task Force on National Security and Law ),“ United Nations Collective Security and the United States Security Guarantee in an Age of Rising Multipolarity: The Security Council as the Talking Shop of the Nations ,” Summer 2009 , Chicago Journal of International Law , Vol 10, Is. 1 [Ethos]

“The truest description of the international security situation since 1990 is, in fact, quite different. It is actually two systems - the UN and US security systems - operating in parallel while conjoined at several points. There is a weak one, the UN collective security apparatus, and there is a strong one, the US security guarantee. Understood this way, the US is not merely a, or even the, dominant and most powerful actor within a system of security either collective or selective. Rather, the US offers a genuinely alternative system of international peace and security that is separate from the role it also plays as a dominant actor within the UN collective security apparatus of theSecurity Council. [31]The dominant actor's willingness to extend a security guarantee to a sizable portion of the planet, explicitly and implicitly, alters the meaning, necessity, and quality of collective security at the UN itself. These are two fundamentally different game-theory scenarios: on the one hand, a dominant actor within a UN collective security-defection international relations "game"; on the other hand, an actor that offers its own security package alongside that of the UN in a parallel collective security game. In a diplomatic system characterized by insincere public promises, easy defection, moral hazard, and free-riding, the fig leaf is assiduously maintained that the UN constitutes, or anyway offers, a collective security system. Whereas in fact, most leading players in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, and even the Middle East, are unwilling to test the strength of that system: countries pay insincere lip service to the UN system, while actually relying on the US system. For all the extant elite complaining and populist anti-Americanism, a remarkable number of countries have counted the costs of adherence to the US security promise and found it rather better than their own, and better than the UN's, and better than anything else on offer, as to both benefits and costs. After all, the US does not even particularly care when those under its security hegemony (which extends far beyond its allies or clients to provide, perversely, significant stability benefits even to America's acknowledged enemies) heap abuse on it (justified or not) because, in the grand scheme of things, it understands (however inchoately and inconstandy) that the system incorporates (often heartfelt but, in the final policy result, insincere) public rejection and protest by the system's beneficiaries. The US is not imperial in a way that would cause it much to care. Part of accepting US security hegemony by its beneficiaries includes their rational desire to displace security costs onto another party, even if that providing party thereby has equally rational reasons to look to its own interests first, since it so overwhelmingly pays the costs.”