GA背景材料

Background Guide PKUNMUN2011 1 Peking University National Model United Nations Conference for High School Students 2011 General Assembly Legal Committee (GA Legal) Topic: Measures to Eliminate International Terrorism Background Guide GA Legal 背景指导编写人员 张月尧 北京大学法学院 08级本科 姜 斌 北京大学法学院 08级本科 赵笑竹 北京大学法学院 07级本科 All rights reserved. This publication should not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the Organizing Committee of PKUNMUN2011. 背景指导版权归北京大学全国中学生模拟联合国大会组委会所有，未经允许，不得以任何方 式出版、引用。 Background Guide PKUNMUN2011 2 Peking University National Model United Nations Conference for High School Students 2011 CONENTS WELCOME LETTER FROM THE CHAIR ......................................................... 4 INTRODUCTION OF THE COMMITTEE .......................................................... 6 TOPIC: MEASURES TO ELIMINATE INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM ..... 7 INTRODUCTION OF THE TOPIC ................................................................... 7 PART 1: HISTORY AND DISCUSSION OF THE PROBLEM ......................... 8 PART 2: PAST INTERNATIONAL ACTIONS ............................................... 10 Historical Context ........................................................................................................... 10 Declaration on Measures to Eliminate International Terrorism, in General Assembly resolution 49/60 of 9 December 1994 ............................................................................. 10 Declaration to Supplement the 1994 Declaration on Measures to Eliminate International Terrorism, in General Assembly resolution 51/210 of 17 December 1996 ......................................................................................................................................... 12 United Nations Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy....................................................... 13 The Comprehensive Approaches Taken .......................................................................... 14 Regional Actions Taken Against International Terrorism .............................................. 15 International Conventions ............................................................................................... 16 Case study 1: the Lockerbie Bombing (Pan Am Flight 103) ........................................... 19 Case study 2: September 11 Attacks ............................................................................... 22 Case study 3: Iraq War ................................................................................................... 24 PART 3: CURRENT SITUATIONS ................................................................. 26 The Need To Define Terrorism In International Criminal Law ...................................... 26 Obstacles To A Comprehensive Definition ..................................................................... 27 Humanitarian Intervention.............................................................................................. 28 Trial on Terrorism Acts ................................................................................................... 29 Building Comprehensive Legal Framework on Counter Terrorism ............................... 29 The Sectoral Approach and National Law ...................................................................... 29 PART 4: BLOC POSITIONS ........................................................................... 31 European Union .............................................................................................................. 31 The United States ............................................................................................................ 32 China and Russian Federation ........................................................................................ 32 Islamic Countries ............................................................................................................ 32 PART 5: PROPOSED SOLUTIONS ................................................................ 33 PART 6: QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER........................................................... 36 SUGGESTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH .................................................... 37 REFERENCES ...................................................................................................... 38 A. Legal Instruments ..................................................................................... 38 Background Guide PKUNMUN2011 3 Peking University National Model United Nations Conference for High School Students 2011 B. Documents ................................................................................................ 38 C. Websites ................................................................................................... 39 D. Books and Articles .................................................................................... 39 LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1 Wreckage of the Pan Am Flight 103 ............................................................................. 20 Figure 2 Principal offender Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi ............................................ 20 Figure 3 The Lockerbie Bombing : numbers of victims by nations .......................................... 21 Figure 4 September 11 attacks ..................................................................................................... 22 Figure 5 George W. Bush and Osama Bin Laden ....................................................................... 23 Figure 6 Terrorist incidents in the world, 2000-2008 ................................................................. 31 Figure 7 Image of the terrorist in Munich Massacre ................................................................. 31 Background Guide PKUNMUN2011 4 Peking University National Model United Nations Conference for High School Students 2011 WELCOME LETTER FROM THE CHAIR Dear delegates, It is our distinct pleasure to welcome all of you to PKUNMUN2011, and more importantly, to the Sixth Committee of the General Assembly, Legal Committee. We are honored to be your dais for what will undoubtedly be a thrilling session and we are looking forward to working with every one of you. Before we meet in person, please let us make self-introductions respectively. Greetings, dear delegates, I am Zhang Yueyao, your co-director in GA Legal. I am a junior in Peking University Law School and am taking French as second major. This is my fourth trip to PKUNMUN and I guarantee that each of my past three was exceedingly delightful. The topic we choose this year is of immense significance in present global circumstances and I hope that you may endeavor to make a junior contribution on global terrorism issues. As your director, I am excited to see your debate and resolutions arisen from this topic. Enjoy yourselves in GA Legal. I’m Jiang Bin, also your co-director in GA Legal. I’m a junior from Law School, PKU. It’s a great honour to be with you in General Assembly, PKUNMUN. I’ m always excited to work with people younger than me, not because it fills me with the feeling of superiority but because it recalls my passion and dreams at their age. MUN is both a place to grow and a place to gain, hope you can enjoy it. The Sixth Committee primary concerns the legal questions in the General Assembly. This Back Ground Guide provides you the indispensable background knowledge and current affairs taken place concerning the topic, about which we hope you understand thoroughly. Besides the back ground knowledge, relevant legislation, past actions taken either by the United Nations or by other international entities and records of international conferences will help you greatly in forming a better understanding about the general situation as well as the main legal perspective. Additionally, as on legal issues we are working, we suggest you read profoundly the relevant cases, which can be referred to as precedents in drafting your resolutions. We also want to remind you that it is essential to grasp the position and interest of the state you are representing. As diplomats of your countries, you are supposed to make out the best of your countries’ interests, and therefore you should focus on the interpretation of law, the precision of the rules, which will affect the flexibility of states’ practice, the feasibility of the sanctions and the essential interests of your country on the topic. As you participate in this conference, you will encounter crisis raised by the Security Council. Since the General Assembly and Security Council are designed as a joint system in PKUNMUN2011, delegates are then expected to give quick response to the crisis and draw out Draft Directive. We believe that the Crisis Series will bring more challenges and thrills to the conference. If you encounter any problems in reading this Background Guide, the Critical Thinking and Questions To Consider part may help you understand the topic better. Also you are most welcome to ask us any academic questions. Background Guide PKUNMUN2011 5 Peking University National Model United Nations Conference for High School Students 2011 Finally, we wish all of you good luck and let us work jointly to make the coming 4-day conference a remarkable one. “Our defense is not in our armaments, nor in science, nor in going underground. Our defense is in law and order.” -Albert Einstein Sincerely yours, Dais at GA Legal: Jiang Bin: jiangbin.mun@gmail.com Zhang Yueyao: zhangyueyao.mun@gmail.com Zhao Xiaozhu: zhaoxiaozhu.mun@gmail.com Lai Mengyin: laimengyin.mun@gmail.com Yang Yanjie: yangyanjie.mun@gmail.com Background Guide PKUNMUN2011 6 Peking University National Model United Nations Conference for High School Students 2011 INTRODUCTION OF THE COMMITTEE The General Assembly was established in 1945 under the Charter of the United Nations with a view of being the chief deliberative, policymaking, and representative organ of the United Nations. Every member nation has exactly one vote in the General Assembly committees. The committees of the General Assembly only have the power to pass non-binding resolutions recommending solutions to world issues. However, these resolutions hold important legal effects. They may be evidences of customary law, or of the correct interpretation of the United Nations Charter. The General Assembly is therefore very important “in the process of standard-setting and the codification of international law.” Among the six GA committees, no committee is more involved in setting the standards of international law than the Legal committee. Also known as the Sixth committee (being the sixth, and last, of the main standing committees of the General Assembly), the Legal committee deals with international matters that have (or need) a legal context. The agenda items of the Sixth Committee usually concern with the comprehensive issues of imminent urgency, such as international terrorism (specifically the ways in which states can carry out measures to reduce it), which is a recurring issue on the agenda of Legal Committee. The International Criminal Court is also an object of much discussion on the committee, as well as the protection of diplomats in the international community. It is also interesting to note that in 2006, the Legal committee did a “comprehensive review of the whole question of peacekeeping operations in all their aspects.” At meantime the Sixth Committee concerns specific legal issues as well. In its recent session (its sixty-third) in 2008, the Sixth committee discussed topics on a similar wavelength, the idea of legal matters at an international level. Thus, it should come as no surprise that one of the matters on the agenda was “the rule of law at the national and international levels.” Another item was the “criminal accountability of United Nations officials and experts on missions.” The Sixth committee also discussed the issue of nationality of persons in relation to succession of states. As already stated, the committee passes resolutions on such issues, and these resolutions put pressure on states in the international community to obey the standards of law set forth in the resolution. Although such resolutions do not technically have a binding power on the international community, the idea of being above the precedents of the General Assembly is mostly a thing of the past. Many resolutions of General Assembly committees (especially the Legal committee, which deals specifically with lawmaking) can be taken as proof of international law, and are therefore binding on the member states. This means a lot for the accountability and authority of the Legal Committees in the General Assembly. Although it may not have the power to establish international law on paper, the precedents that the Legal Committee sets are authoritative decisions about what international law should be interpreted as. Background Guide PKUNMUN2011 7 Peking University National Model United Nations Conference for High School Students 2011 TOPIC: MEASURES TO ELIMINATE INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM INTRODUCTION OF THE TOPIC The topic for PKUNMUN2011 at GA Legal is of utmost significance on current global stage—measures to eliminate international terrorism. A long existed threat to the international community as it is, the recent proliferation of terrorism acts, especially the 9-11, has once again brought eliminating international terrorism to the crest of international attention. As recalled in the United Nations Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy, International terrorism is strongly condemned in all its forms and manifestations, and it remains a major threat to international peace and security. Therefore, the transnational dimension of the phenomenon requires a global response of the international community, which should be coordinated both at the regional and international levels. Faced to international terrorism, a consensus has been reached in the Sixty-third session of GA Legal (agenda item 99, Authority: resolution 62/71) that counter-terrorism measures must be in conformity with the Charter of the United Nations, international law, and in particular human rights, refugee and humanitarian law. However, the consensus reached is still too vague to draw feasible solution to eliminate international terrorism. There are considerable problems remain to be solved on the measures to eliminate international terrorism. These unsolved problems reflect the possible perspectives in eliminating international terrorism; hence it is highly worth of consideration. The current problems on this topic are mainly but not limited to: 1. The absence of the definition of terrorism is undermining the legitimacy of the United Nations to deal with this scourge. One of the subsidiary problems of the absence of the definition of terrorism is how to differentiate the right of peoples to self-determination and to fight against foreign occupation between extreme terrorism actions, when the former should undoubtedly be respected; 2. The formulation of an effective collaboration system in combating international terrorism; 3. Legality and feasibility of the sanctions; 4. The role of the United Nations in the formulation of the response of the international community to terrorism. 5. The conditions conducive to terrorism should be recalled, as well as other crimes used to finance terrorism, such as drug trafficking. 6. The distrust relationship on terrorism issues existed between states, especially between developed western countries headed by the United States of America and the Islam Nations causes Background Guide PKUNMUN2011 8 Peking University National Model United Nations Conference for High School Students 2011 great difficulty in establishing an effective collaboration system. The above problems are also the tasks set for you in this conference. The cases of international terrorism given in this Background Guide should be studied with special concentration. It is indeed for situations like this that the Legal Committee was formed. This topic has been discussed by the General Assembly over times and it is up to the Legal Committee to define the lines that surround the issue. Please read this study guide then with your nation’s image of a better world in mind, make possible through the forging of a clear legal framework upon which these issues can be resolved. PART 1: HISTORY AND DISCUSSION OF THE PROBLEM Even with this current sense of urgency regarding the threat of terrorism, it is important to note that terrorist acts have been committed for years and even centuries. This is not the first time that it has caught the attention of the international community. In 1934 the League of Nations discussed a draft convention to address the issue of terrorist activities. Since the 1960s, international terrorism has become ever intensifying. Vast expansion of international terrorism took place in West Europe, Middle East, Latin America and South Asia. Statistic reveals that in the year 1970, the number of international terrorism occurrence was 293, which increased to 856 in the year 1988. With the increase in quantity, the hotspot of international terrorism changes in the past half century. From 1968 to 1980, the total number of international terrorism occurrence was 6714, within which 2206 took place in the Western Europe, occupying 32.9% of the total number. While after the 1980s, the most frequently stricken territory turned to be Middle East. Among the total 856 terrorism affair in the year 1988, 313 were taken in the Middle East, with a percentage of 36%. The 1990s witnessed a rapid expansion of the spread of acts of terrorism in many regions of the world. The growing and dangerous links between terrorist groups and other criminal groups engaged in organized transnational crime, such as drug trafficking, human smuggling, unlawful arms trade, money laundering and the smuggling of nuclear and other potentially dangerous material had begun to manifest themselves, and demanded a concerted response by way of heightened international cooperation. Yet most of us can agree that even though the threat has existed for a long time, there has been an evolution in its nature over the past 20 to 30 years—namely in terms of the sophistication and reach of some transnational terrorist actors. This is not to suggest that local and regional terrorist actors and organizations are unsophisticated or unimportant. Quite the contrary, many UN member states continue to counter threats from local and regional groups. For example, the citizens of Sri Lanka have faced violence at the hands of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, more commonly known as the Tamil Tigers, for more than 30 years. In South America, Colombia and several of its neighboring states continue to address the activities of FARC—the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—a group whose origins date back to the 1960s. Within the United States, there have been internal terrorist actions and plans—some Background Guide PKUNMUN2011 9 Peking University National Model United Nations Conference for High School Students 2011 prevented and some carried out. At the same time, the reach and sophistication of regional and international terrorist networks add new dimensions to the threat. The objectives of the groups tend to be more “national” in nature, such as seeking an independent state of t