The Security Council veto and Syria: responding to mass atrocities through the “Uniting for Peace” resolution
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Syrian conflict has brought into sharp focus the exercise of the veto by some permanent members of the Security Council, highlighting significant shortcomings in the Council’s ability to respond effectively to grave humanitarian situations, particularly those involving mass atrocity crimes. It has also raised issues of legitimacy and credibility in Security Council decision-making, yet a growing clamour within the General Assembly for veto reform has, to date, not resulted in tangible change. The purpose of this article is to examine how the Security Council can improve the effectiveness of its response to humanitarian concerns but still maintain its position at the centre of the response to threats to international peace and security. We explore whether the Uniting for Peace Resolution can provide a constitutional response to negating the exigencies of the veto and enhance legitimacy in Security Council decision-making whilst keeping the Security Council at the centre of the solution. As a practical remedy to unblocking the Security Council in limited circumstances, we advocate an approach which maintains the constitutional balance of power under the United Nations Charter by placing the Security Council, as the body tasked with primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security, at the centre of the operation of the Uniting for Peace Resolution by determining when its use is appropriate and what measures will be adopted as a consequence. We propose the use of independent monitoring and verification bodies to carry out fact-finding and objective evaluation to strengthen the legitimacy of Uniting for Peace.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".