Security Council Change: The Pressure of Emerging International Public Policy

As international lawyers know, the concept of sanctions lies at the heart of fundamental debates on the nature and function of international law. Sanctions are of course linked to the general problem of compliance inherent in the prescriptive nature of any legal order. Under general international law, there was and still is no socially organized sanction along the lines of states' legal systems. Reactions to violations of the horizontal system that is international law have traditionally been unilateral, i.e., have taken the form of private justice. States enforced their own rights and, in invoking responsibility, freely determined the legal consequences they ascribed to other states' infringement of their rights, having recourse to coercive measures if necessary. In short, unpredictable decentralized reactions to violations of international law were and still are, to a large extent, the rule in international society. However, the progressive institutionalization of international society has had an impact not only on the structure and normative content of international law, but also on its enforcement. On the one hand, there has been a progressive limitation of resort to unilateral measures, not only through the regulation of the traditional sovereign right to use military force - from the outlawry of war to the outlawry of military reprisals - but equally with efforts to constrain non-military countermeasures such as unilateral trade measures, whether through the establishment of prior conditions or through subsequent control - under the law of international economic institutions (World Trade Organization, European Union), the law on state responsibility, or charter law.