NATO's decision to wage war in Yugoslavia without endorsement from the UN Security Council is a "grave setback to the rule of law" and may have further malign repercussions for world stability, a former UN official has warned.
Speaking in Dublin last night, Mr Cedric Thornberry, former UN assistant secretary general, also warned that the US may be using its NATO role for reasons of domestic politics.
"The current bombing of Yugoslavia by NATO may or may not prove morally unjustifiable, deserved or expedient. Time will tell. What has, however, been unfortunate has been NATO's resort to war without first having gone to the United Nations," he said.
"The UN Charter, by which we are all bound and whose rules have precedence over all other rules of international law, prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, unless force is justifiable on grounds of self-defence or as an enforcement measure under Chapter VII of the UN Chapter," Mr Thornberry said.
"It has to be said that no legal exception justifies the current attack by NATO's 19 members. Indeed, the North Atlantic Treaty itself forbids such unilateralism," he said.
"The prohibition against the use of forces, except where authorised by the international community, is central to the idea of international law, order and security. The fervour of one's own belief in the rightness of one's cause is no excuse for taking the law into one's hands, whether in domestic or in internal law. The international community has steadily been moving, for a hundred years, to prohibit resort to force. This illadvised failure is a grave setback for the rule of law. Nobody can say at this time just how widely its malign repercussions may spread," he said.
"While NATO's bypassing of the UN may have originated in some ill-founded advice, various trends in recent years have pointed to a more deliberate course of action, including the failure of the US to meet its financial obligations to the UN, thereby effectively crippling the organisation's operational activities. A relative late-comer to the important conflict-management mechanism of international peacekeeping, Washington has sometimes given the impression, on this side of the Atlantic, that it wants to hijack the concept and make use of it for purposes of domestic policy.
"It has been troubling that Britain, France and other leading members of the western alliance have so far been ineffectual in resisting these tendencies, which seem to be growing," Mr Thornberry said.
"I should like to make it absolutely clear that nothing of what I am saying condones, in any slightest degree, the mass expulsions and gross breaches of human rights being carried out in Kosovo by Serb forces. My concern is that NATO currently lacks the essential legitimacy in doing what it has to do and which only UN authority can today provide." Admitting that some UN peacekeeping operations had been "absolute disasters", Mr Thornberry, who is currently a visiting professor at King's College, London, said that compared to the expenditure on NATO missions, the UN operations had to be run "on a shoestring".
He was speaking at a seminar on "Conflict and Neutrality in Tomorrow's World", organised by the INCORE group on conflict resolution and ethnicity, sponsored by The Irish Times.
Another speaker, Mr Jon Day, director of defence policy for the UK Ministry of Defence, said the failure of the United Nation's UNPROFOR mission in Yugoslavia showed that "ad-hoc" multinational UN forces could not achieve the resolution of conflict that a "coherent" NATO-led force like the Interim Force could.
The former Chief of Staff of the Defence Forces, Lieut Gen Gerry McMahon, said he foresaw Irish military involvement in peacekeeping missions only under UN mandate and it would be unlikely that the Republic would ever join NATO.