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United Nations Charter

How China Wins At The United Nations Without Really Trying

When Fu Cong, China’s ambassador to the United Nations, was asked whether Beijing intended to fill the financial and other voids left by Washington in the multilateral system, he said that China was already the “de facto” No. 1 contributor to the U.N. regular budget and had no interest in replacing the United States. Over the last 15 months, the Trump administration has cut funding to several U.N. agencies, withdrawn from numerous international bodies and treaties, made token payments toward its mandated dues and pushed consistently for narrower, cheaper peacekeeping mandates.

Trump Will Try To Defend Aggression Toward Venezuela

The Trump administration’s massive military attack on Venezuela, launched with 150 aircraft, reportedly killed upwards of 80 people, including civilians. In utter defiance of the mandates of the United Nations Charter, U.S. forces launched the attack as they kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, First Lady Cilia Flores, who have been transported to New York, where they face drug trafficking charges. After two world wars claimed more than 100 million lives, 50 countries came together and enacted the UN Charter to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.”

NATO Summit: Not A Shield But A Bloodied Sword

The pressing question we are required to grapple with today is the question of why? What lies at the root and what is the common denominator responsible for mankind’s abject failure to achieve the vision set out in the U.N. Charter? Upon due consideration, we are left in no doubt that, fundamentally, the series of conflicts that have come to define our existence are a consequence of the drive by one ideological bloc to dominate and impose a particular political, economic and value system onto a world defined by its diversity of languages, cultures, histories and traditions. The result is the normalization of war and the apotheosis of hard power, rather than war and hard power being regarded as grotesque perversions and an impediment to human progress.

Iran’s Attack Was A Legal Response To Israel’s Illegal Attack

On April 1, Israel mounted an unprovoked military attack on a building that was part of the Iranian Embassy complex in Damascus, Syria, killing seven of Iran’s senior military advisers and five additional people. The victims included Gen. Mohamad Reza Zahedi, head of Iran’s covert military operations in Lebanon and Syria, and two other senior generals. Although Israel’s attack violated the United Nations Charter, the UN Security Council refused to condemn it because the United States, the U.K. and France exercised their vetoes on April 4.

If The United Nations Charter Was Put To A Vote Today, Would It Pass?

Each year in September, the heads of governments come to the United Nations Headquarters in New York City to inaugurate a new session of the General Assembly. The area surrounding the headquarters becomes colourful, delegates from each of the 193 member states milling about the UN building and then going out to lunch in the array of restaurants in its vicinity that scraped through the pandemic. Depending on the conflicts that abound, certain speeches are taken seriously; conflicts in this or that part of the world demand attention to the statements made by their leaders, but otherwise there is a queue of speeches that are made and then forgotten. On 25 September, the prime minister of Barbados, Mia Amor Mottley, took the stage in an almost empty UN General Assembly chamber.

Does Canada’s Unilateral Sanctions Regime Violate International Law?

Is Canada breaking international law when it applies to unilateral coercive economic measures, commonly referred to as sanctions? Most countries and international law experts believe sanctions are only legitimate when approved by the United Nations Security Council or the World Trade Organization. Economic sanctions outside the framework of the UN Charter are generally considered “unilateral” and unlawful. According to a report by the Asian-African Legal Consultative Organization, “the imposition of unilateral and secondary sanctions on countries through application of national legislation is not-permissible under international law.” This means that US sanctions on Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, Syria and elsewhere clearly violate the UN Charter.

The Future Will Only Contain What We Put Into It Now

At Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we take the UN Charter as the foundation of our work. To advance its goals is an essential step for the construction of humanity, which is a concept of aspiration rather than a concept of fact; we are not yet human beings, but we strive to become human. Imagine if we lived in a world without war and with respect for international law, if we lived in a world that honoured fundamental human rights and tried to promote the widest social progress? This would a be a world where the productive resources would no longer be used for military hardware but would be used to end hunger, to end illiteracy, to end poverty, to end houselessness, to end – in other words – the structural features of indignity.

Popular Resistance Expresses Solidarity With Venezuela Against US Blockade

On August 6, 2019, at the same time that National Security Adviser John Bolton is leading a US delegation in Peru to organize opposition to the elected government of Venezuela, the White House released a statement about a new executive order signed by President Trump that creates a blockade on Venezuela. And it imposes a travel ban, under the discretion of the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, to block anyone from entering the United States who supports the elected government of Venezuela. Popular Resistance opposes the illegal actions being taken by the United States, including this latest blockade, and urges the United States to end the unilateral coercive economic measures and threats of military attack, which violate the United Nations Charter.
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Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

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