Politics1 min read

'What would be left of international legal order': Araghchi on US strikes

By · Via Middle East Eye · Published by Everything Blog

In short

In an opinion piece published by Japan's Kyodo News, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi condemned recent U.S. and Israeli operations for bypassing United Nations Security Council authorization. He argued that the actions failed to meet the strict self-defense standards established under Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, which require an actual armed attack to have occurred. Araghchi also pointed out that the military strikes struck civilian infrastructure, schools, sports stadiums, and Iranian nuclear facilities operating under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards. He insisted that such operations must be evaluated through international humanitarian law rather than post-hoc poli…

Key points

  • Unilateral attacks based on perceived future threats erode the post-World War II legal fr…: Unilateral attacks based on perceived future threats erode the post-World War II legal framework.
  • Article 51 of the U.N. Charter requires an actual armed attack to legally justify armed s…: Article 51 of the U.N. Charter requires an actual armed attack to legally justify armed self-defense.
  • Legality surrounding military interventions must strictly align with international humani…: Legality surrounding military interventions must strictly align with international humanitarian law standards.

Sources checked by our analysis pipeline: 1

"If states were free to attack one another based on their own assessments of possible future threats, what would be left of the international legal order?" Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has asked in an opinion piece for Japan's Kyodo News.

"This question," Araghchi wrote, "goes well beyond the political dispute between Iran and the United States."

"It concerns one of the fundamental principles on which the international order established after the Second World War rests: the use of force is governed by law, and no state, however powerful, is entitled to place its own judgment above binding rules of international law," the article read.

He said the US-Israeli strikes constituted a clear violation of the prohibition on the use of force and an infringement of Iran's sovereignty.

"Their legality must be assessed against the U.N. Charter and established principles of international law, not against political arguments or justifications advanced after military operations have begun," he wrote.

He said the US had neither obtained UN Security Council authorisation nor established grounds for invoking self-defence under Article 51, which permits force…

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