Security Council Adopts Resolution 1970 (2011) with respect to Lybia

Security Council Adopts Resolution 1970 (2011) with respect to Lybia

Yesterday the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1970, whereby it (1) imposed an arms embargo on Lybia; (2) imposed targeted sanctions, including travel bans and asset freezes, on high-level persons in the Lybian regime; (3) and referred the situation in Lybia to the International Criminal Court. This is the second UNSC referral to the ICC, the first after Darfur and the first to be passed unanimously. The full text of the resolution is available here, and a UN press release can be found here.

The resolution also makes several notable findings, such as that the ‘widespread and systematic attacks currently taking place in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya against the civilian population may amount to crimes against humanity’; it also requests Lybia to respect both human rights and IHL, which indicates that the UNSC considers there to be an armed conflict in Lybia, and that IHL and human rights apply in a complementary fashion (this is of course not the first time that the Council has said something similar).  Notably with regard to the ICC referral, as with Darfur the resolution does not expressly say that Gaddafi will not be entitled to head of state immunity (assuming that the ‘head of the revolution’ is indeed a head of state under international law), even though that inference may be reasonably drawn – that issue might of course become moot if Gaddafi is actually toppled, which is perhaps more likely than not.

As for the targeted sanctions regime, like with the terrorist sanctions regime before it there is very little here with regard to guarantees of due process for the listed persons. Will the Gaddafis, led perhaps by LSE-PhD holding Saif (who may or may not had plagiarized his PhD on human rights and global governance), follow the bright example of the late Saddam Hussein and file an application with the European Court of Human Rights to protect their (presumable) Swiss millions? Bearing in mind the manifest deficit in the dictatorial psyche when it comes to self-irony, I wouldn’t put it past them.