BLS LLB 5 Years Sem 9 Public International Law and Human Rights 2021-22 Question Paper with Solutions

The answer is (c), a person who has been the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, that is, a former Chief Justice of India.

Section 3(2)(a) of the Protection of Human Rights Act, 1993, as amended by the Protection of Human Rights (Amendment) Act, 2019, provides that the Commission shall consist of a Chairperson who has been Chief Justice of India or a Judge of the Supreme Court. Of the four options, only (c) states a qualification the section recognises.

The answer is (b), the Second World War.

The atrocities of the war, and above all the Holocaust, destroyed the argument that the way a State treated its own nationals was a matter within its domestic jurisdiction alone. The consequences followed immediately: the Charter of the United Nations, 1945, which made the promotion of human rights a purpose of the Organization under Article 1(3) and imposed duties of cooperation under Articles 55 and 56; the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, which established individual criminal responsibility for crimes against humanity; and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 10 December 1948.

The answer is (b), section 21.

Section 21(1) of the Protection of Human Rights Act, 1993 provides that a State Government may constitute a body to be known as the (name of the State) Human Rights Commission to exercise the powers conferred upon, and to perform the functions assigned to, a State Commission under Chapter V of the Act.

Section 21(2), as amended in 2019, fixes the composition: a Chairperson who has been Chief Justice or a Judge of a High Court; one Member who is or has been a Judge of a High Court or a District Judge with at least seven years as District Judge; and one Member with knowledge of or practical experience in human rights.

The answer is (b), 30 articles.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the General Assembly at Paris on 10 December 1948 by Resolution 217A (III), with 48 votes in favour, none against and 8 abstentions. It consists of a preamble and thirty articles.

Oppenheim

The answer is (d), L. Oppenheim.

The passage is the classical definition from Oppenheim's International Law: A Treatise (1905): "Law of Nations or International Law is the name for the body of customary and conventional rules which are considered legally binding by civilised States in their intercourse with each other."

The answer is (c), the general principles of law recognised by civilised nations.

Article 38(1) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice lists what the Court is to apply: (a) international conventions; (b) international custom; (c) the general principles of law recognised by civilised nations; and (d), subject to Article 59, judicial decisions and the teachings of the most highly qualified publicists, as subsidiary means for the determination of rules of law.

Clauses (a), (b) and (c) are the primary or formal sources; clause (d) is expressly subsidiary. Of the four options only (c) appears among the first three.

(d) Opino juris sine necessitatis.

The answer as the paper intends it is (c), uniform practice of States, longevity of time period and opinio juris sive necessitatis.

Article 38(1)(b) of the Statute describes custom as "international custom, as evidence of a general practice accepted as law", and the traditional formulation of the tests is threefold: a practice that is general and uniform, continued over a period of time, and accompanied by opinio juris sive necessitatis, the conviction that the practice is legally obligatory.

The answer is (a), the North Sea Continental Shelf cases (Federal Republic of Germany v. Denmark; Federal Republic of Germany v. Netherlands), decided on 20 February 1969.

The Court held that the equidistance principle for delimiting the continental shelf, contained in Article 6 of the Geneva Convention on the Continental Shelf, 1958, did not bind Germany, which was not a party to that Convention, and that it had not become a rule of customary international law. Delimitation was to be effected by agreement in accordance with equitable principles, taking account of all the relevant circumstances, so as to leave each party as much as possible of the natural prolongation of its land territory.

The answer is (a), the constitutive theory.

The constitutive theory holds that recognition creates the State: an entity becomes a subject of international law, with rights and duties, only when the existing States recognise it, whatever its factual attributes may be. Its exponents are Hegel, Anzilotti, Holland and, in his earlier editions, Oppenheim.

The answer is (a), The Hague, Netherlands.

Article 22(1) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice provides that the seat of the Court shall be established at The Hague, though this does not prevent it from sitting and exercising its functions elsewhere whenever it considers it desirable. It sits in the Peace Palace, which it shares with the Permanent Court of Arbitration, and it is the only one of the six principal organs of the United Nations not located in New York.

For full marks, cover: the constitutional scheme, the fundamental rights available to workers with cases, the directive principles that form the charter of labour, the way the two have been joined through Article 21, the international obligations, and the statutory position after the labour codes.

I. The constitutional scheme

The Constitution protects workers at two levels. Part III contains the enforceable Fundamental Rights; Part IV contains the Directive Principles of State Policy, which Article 37 declares fundamental in the governance of the country but not enforceable by any court. The social security mandate is chiefly in Part IV, and the whole of the modern law consists in the way the courts have made it effective through Part III.

II. Fundamental Rights available to workers

Article 21, which has been held to include the right to livelihood, Olga Tellis v. Bombay Municipal Corporation (1985), and the right to live with human dignity, including just and humane conditions of work and relief against sickness and disablement, Bandhua Mukti Morcha v. Union of India (1984), and the right to health of a worker, Consumer Education and Research Centre v. Union of India (1995), which concerned asbestos workers and directed compulsory health insurance and compensation for occupational disease.

Article 23, prohibiting begar and other similar forms of forced labour, and enforceable against private persons as well as the State. People's Union for Democratic Rights v. Union of India (1982), the Asiad workers case, held that payment of less than the minimum wage is forced labour within Article 23, because a person driven by hunger and want does not offer his labour freely.

Article 24, prohibiting the employment of a child below fourteen in any factory or mine or other hazardous employment.

III. The Directive Principles: the charter of labour

Article 42, just and humane conditions of work and maternity relief; Article 43, a living wage, conditions of work ensuring a decent standard of life and full enjoyment of leisure and social and cultural opportunities, and the promotion of cottage industries; Article 43A, inserted by the 42nd Amendment, 1976, the participation of workers in the management of undertakings; Article 43B, promotion of cooperative societies; and Article 47, raising the level of nutrition and the standard of living and improvement of public health.

IV. How the two have been joined

The technique is to read the directive into Article 21. Bandhua Mukti Morcha made Article 42 the content of the right to life for bonded labourers in the stone quarries of Faridabad. Municipal Corporation of Delhi v. Female Workers (Muster Roll) (2000) extended maternity benefit to daily wage muster roll workers who had no statutory entitlement, reading Article 42 with Article 21 and with Article 11(2)(b) of CEDAW. Regional Director, ESI Corporation v. Francis De Costa and the line of cases on the Employees' State Insurance Act interpret social security legislation beneficially for the same reason.

V. The international obligations behind them

The scattered legislation has been consolidated into four labour codes, all brought into force on 21 November 2025: the Code on Wages, 2019, covering minimum wages, payment of wages, bonus and equal remuneration; the Industrial Relations Code, 2020, covering trade unions, standing orders, and lay-off, retrenchment and closure; the Code on Social Security, 2020, which consolidates provident fund, employees' state insurance, gratuity, maternity benefit and employees' compensation and, for the first time, brings unorganised, gig and platform workers within a statutory framework; and the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020, which subsumes the Factories Act, the Contract Labour Act, the Inter-State Migrant Workmen Act and ten other statutes. An answer written today must say so, because the Acts named in older textbooks no longer stand on their own.

For full marks, cover: what judicial activism means and its constitutional basis, the procedural innovations, the substantive expansion of Article 21, the use of international law, the new remedies, the criticism of overreach, and a balanced conclusion.

I. What it means and where the power comes from

Judicial activism is the assumption by the courts of an affirmative role in the protection of rights and in the enforcement of constitutional obligations, going beyond the passive adjudication of disputes between parties, by relaxing procedure, by giving expansive meaning to constitutional guarantees and by devising remedies where none existed.

Fact finding by commissions and amicus curiae, appointed by the Court where the petitioner has no means of proving his case.

III. The substantive expansion of Article 21

Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India (1978) is the turning point: the procedure contemplated by Article 21 must be right, just and fair, and Articles 14, 19 and 21 must be read together, which introduced substantive fairness in place of the narrow reading in A. K. Gopalan (1950).

On that base the Court has read into Article 21 the rights to livelihood (Olga Tellis, 1985), food (PUCL, from 2001), health (Consumer Education and Research Centre, 1995), education (Unni Krishnan, 1993, which produced Article 21A and the Act of 2009), shelter, a clean environment (Subhash Kumar, 1991), speedy trial (Hussainara Khatoon, 1979), free legal aid (M. H. Hoskot, 1978), privacy (Puttaswamy, 2017) and, most recently, freedom from the adverse effects of climate change (M. K. Ranjitsinh, 21 March 2024).

IV. The use of international law

The objections are serious and belong in the answer. Separation of powers: the Court has issued directions on matters of policy and administration which the Constitution assigns to the executive and the legislature. Institutional competence: polycentric questions, such as how a city should manage its solid waste, are not well suited to adversarial adjudication on affidavits. Enforcement: many orders remain unimplemented, and the Court has no machinery to supervise them. Selectivity and elitism: PIL has been criticised for serving urban and middle class concerns, as in the slum demolition and vehicle emission cases, at the cost of the poor whose livelihoods are affected. Judicial legislation: Vishaka filled a legislative vacuum, which is defensible; other guidelines have gone further. And the record is not uniform: ADM Jabalpur v. Shivkant Shukla (1976), holding that during an emergency no person had locus standi to move for habeas corpus even against an illegal detention, is the low point, and it was formally overruled in Puttaswamy (2017).

For full marks, cover: the basis of classification, the three generations with their content and instruments, the other principal classifications (civil and political against economic and social, individual against collective, absolute against qualified, derogable against non-derogable, negative against positive), and the point that the classifications are analytical and not hierarchical.

I. The three generations

The best known classification is that of Karel Vasak (1977), who borrowed the motto of the French Revolution.

First generation, civil and political rights, "liberty". Rights of the individual against the State, requiring in the main that the State abstain from interference. Life, liberty and security of person; freedom from torture, slavery and arbitrary arrest; fair trial and the presumption of innocence; privacy; freedom of thought, conscience and religion; freedom of expression, assembly and association; the right to property; the right to participate in government and to vote. Instruments: Articles 3 to 21 of the Universal Declaration, the ICCPR, 1966, and in India Part III of the Constitution.

Individual and collective. Most rights are held by individuals; some, such as self-determination in Article 1 common to both Covenants, the rights of minorities under Article 27 of the ICCPR and the peoples' rights of the African Charter, are held by groups.

Absolute and qualified. A few rights admit of no limitation at all: the prohibitions of torture, slavery and retrospective punishment. Most are qualified, subject to limitations prescribed by law and necessary in a democratic society, as Article 29(2) of the Universal Declaration provides generally and Articles 19(2) to 19(6) of the Constitution provide specifically.

Derogable and non-derogable. Article 4 of the ICCPR permits derogation in time of public emergency threatening the life of the nation, to the extent strictly required, but never from Article 6 (life), Article 7 (torture), Article 8(1) and (2) (slavery), Article 11 (imprisonment for contractual debt), Article 15 (retrospective punishment), Article 16 (recognition as a person) or Article 18 (thought, conscience and religion). In India, Articles 20 and 21 cannot be suspended in any emergency since the 44th Amendment, 1978.

For full marks, cover: the statutory provision, the purpose, which court is designated and how, the provisos, the Special Public Prosecutor, the difficulties that have prevented the scheme working, and the wider institutional context.

I. The provision

Section 30 of the Protection of Human Rights Act, 1993 provides that for the purpose of providing speedy trial of offences arising out of violation of human rights, the State Government may, with the concurrence of the Chief Justice of the High Court, by notification, specify for each district a Court of Session to be a Human Rights Court to try the said offences.

There are two provisos. Nothing in the section applies if (a) a Court of Session is already specified as a special court, or (b) a special court is already constituted for such offences under any other law for the time being in force.

The Act does not define "offences arising out of violation of human rights". Section 2(1)(d) defines human rights, but no provision identifies which offences under the penal law are within the jurisdiction of a Human Rights Court. Since almost every serious offence involves the life, liberty, equality or dignity of an individual, the expression is either too wide, in which case the Court becomes an ordinary Sessions Court, or it is undefined, in which case nobody knows what to file there.

The Court has no original jurisdiction over what is not already an offence. It cannot try a violation of a human right which is not a crime under Indian law; and it takes cognisance only in the manner an ordinary Court of Session does, which in most cases means on committal by a Magistrate. Custodial torture is not a distinct offence in India, because the Convention against Torture, 1984 was signed in 1997 and has never been ratified and the Prevention of Torture Bill has repeatedly lapsed, so the very violation these Courts were meant to try has no separate section to be tried under.

The provisos exclude most of the ground. Where a special court already exists, and special courts have been created under the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012 and other statutes, section 30 does not apply.

Internationally the expression means something quite different, and the contrast is instructive: the European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights at San Jose and the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights at Arusha are treaty courts to which an individual may complain against a State. Asia has no such court, so the Indian Human Rights Court is not a counterpart of them but a domestic criminal court sitting under a special name.

Conclusion. The Human Rights Court under section 30 is the weakest limb of a statute whose other limbs work reasonably well. The idea is sound, that a violation of human rights which is also an offence should be tried quickly by a designated court with a dedicated prosecutor. The execution has failed for three identifiable reasons: the Act never defines the offences to be tried, no separate court or infrastructure is created, and the provisos exclude the cases for which special courts already exist. Until the Act is amended to define the jurisdiction, and until custodial torture is made a distinct offence, these Courts will remain Sessions Courts with a second name.

Criticism. It does not describe what States actually do. Most constitutions require some domestic act before a treaty can be enforced by a court, and no national court will refuse to apply its own statute merely because it conflicts with international law.

II. Dualism

The two are separate and independent systems, differing in three respects, as Triepel and Anzilotti state them: in source, international law arising from the common will of States and municipal law from the will of a single State; in subjects, international law governing States and municipal law governing individuals; and in substance, the one regulating external and the other internal relations. A rule of international law therefore enters domestic law only when the legislature transforms it.

Criticism. It exaggerates the separation. Individuals are now subjects of international law under the human rights treaties and international criminal law; and a State cannot plead its municipal law as a defence to a breach, which Article 27 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, 1969 puts beyond argument.

III. The specific adoption and transformation theories

I. The United States

Treaties. Article VI, clause 2 of the Constitution, the Supremacy Clause, provides that the Constitution, the laws of the United States made in pursuance of it, and all treaties made under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land, binding the judges in every State. Treaties are made by the President with the advice and consent of two thirds of the Senate (Article II, section 2).

The self-executing distinction, drawn by Marshall C.J. in Foster v. Neilson (1829), is the essential qualification: a self-executing treaty operates of itself as law, while a non-self-executing treaty addresses the political branches and requires implementing legislation before a court can enforce it. Medellin v. Texas (2008) applied it to hold that a judgment of the International Court of Justice in the Avena case was not directly enforceable in American courts.

A later Act of Congress prevails over an earlier treaty and a later treaty over an earlier Act, on the ordinary rule of lex posterior, but no treaty can override the Constitution: Reid v. Covert (1957). Alongside treaties, the President makes executive agreements without Senate consent, which are the great majority of American international agreements.

Custom: monist, subject to two limits. Blackstone's doctrine of incorporation was that the law of nations is adopted in its full extent by the common law and held to be part of the law of the land. West Rand Central Gold Mining Company v. The King [1905] 2 K.B. 391 qualified it: a rule of international law is part of English law only so far as it has been recognised and acted upon by our courts, or is of such a nature and has been so widely and generally accepted that it can hardly be supposed that any civilised State would repudiate it. Trendtex Trading Corporation v. Central Bank of Nigeria [1977] Q.B. 529 confirmed incorporation and held that English law moves with changes in customary international law, so that the restrictive doctrine of sovereign immunity replaced the absolute doctrine without legislation. The two limits are that custom yields to a statute, and that it yields to a binding precedent, subject to the Trendtex qualification.

III. India

India follows the British model: dualist for treaties, monist for custom.

Statutes made under Article 253 include the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, made to implement the decisions of the Stockholm Conference, the Protection of Human Rights Act, 1993, and the Anti-Hijacking and Chemical Weapons legislation.

Custom. Customary international law that is not inconsistent with municipal law is treated as incorporated into Indian law and applied by the courts. Gramophone Company of India v. Birendra Bahadur Pandey (1984): the doctrine of incorporation is recognised, and the comity of nations requires that the rules of international law be accommodated in municipal law even without express legislative sanction, provided they do not run into conflict with Acts of Parliament. Vellore Citizens Welfare Forum v. Union of India (1996) applied it to the precautionary and polluter pays principles.

Conclusion. No State is purely monist or purely dualist, and the three practices illustrate the point exactly. All three are monist as to customary international law, which their courts apply without any act of adoption, subject to the supremacy of statute. They differ on treaties: Britain and India require implementing legislation, because in both the treaty-making power belongs to the executive and it would otherwise be able to change the law without the legislature; the United States makes treaties part of the supreme law of the land but has narrowed the effect through the self-executing distinction. The harmonisation theory therefore describes the practice best: the theories are useful for explaining why a court reaches its result, and the actual position in every State is determined not by jurisprudence but by its own constitution.

Jurisdiction with regard to the establishment and use of artificial islands, installations and structures, marine scientific research, and the protection and preservation of the marine environment;

and other rights and duties provided for in the Convention.

What it is not. The zone is not territory and not territorial sea: the coastal State has sovereign rights for specified purposes, not sovereignty, and it has no general legislative competence there.

What other States retain, Article 58. All States, coastal and land-locked, enjoy in the zone the freedoms of navigation and overflight and of the laying of submarine cables and pipelines, and other internationally lawful uses of the sea related to those freedoms, subject to the obligation to have due regard to the rights and duties of the coastal State.

India. India ratified UNCLOS on 29 June 1995. Its zone was declared even earlier, by section 7 of the Territorial Waters, Continental Shelf, Exclusive Economic Zone and Other Maritime Zones Act, 1976, which fixed it at 200 nautical miles. India's maritime boundary with Bangladesh in the Bay of Bengal, including the zone, was settled by an Annex VII arbitral award of 7 July 2014, which India accepted and implemented.

Conclusion. The exclusive economic zone is the central compromise of the Convention. Coastal States, especially the newly independent and developing States, obtained exclusive rights over the fisheries and the hydrocarbons off their own coasts, which is what they had been claiming unilaterally since the Truman Proclamation of 1945 and the Latin American declarations of the 1950s; and the maritime powers obtained, in exchange, the express preservation of navigation, overflight and cable laying throughout the zone. Neither side could have had the whole, and the zone is the line on which they agreed.

The decision. The Court of Appeal held that the Sultan was entitled to immunity and that the action must be dismissed. Three propositions were laid down.

A foreign sovereign cannot be impleaded in the courts of another State without his consent, on the principle par in parem non habet imperium, an equal has no authority over an equal, and out of respect for the independence and dignity of every sovereign State.

The status of the defendant is determined conclusively by a statement from the executive, and the court will not inquire into it for itself; on a certificate of the Colonial Office that the Sultan was an independent sovereign, the court was bound.

Immunity is not lost by the concealment of identity or by the private character of the transaction. Waiver must be made at the time when the court is asked to exercise jurisdiction, by submission to the jurisdiction; an undertaking or conduct before the suit, however deliberate, is not a submission. Lord Esher M.R. said that the sovereign might elect to waive his privilege in the action, but until he did the court had no jurisdiction, and the fact that he had contracted in an assumed name made no difference.

The restriction does not, however, change the result for K personally. The restrictive doctrine applies to the immunity of the State; the personal immunity of a serving Head of State, ratione personae, remains absolute for the duration of the office and covers private acts, as section 20 of the State Immunity Act, 1978 provides by applying the Diplomatic Privileges Act to a sovereign, and as the House of Lords accepted in R. v. Bow Street Metropolitan Stipendiary Magistrate, ex parte Pinochet (No. 3) (1999), which distinguished immunity ratione personae, absolute while in office, from immunity ratione materiae, which continues after office only for official acts and does not extend to torture.

Conclusion. K is entitled to immunity and Q's action must be dismissed. On the law as it stood in Mighell, that follows from the absolute doctrine and from the rule that a false name does not create an estoppel against sovereign immunity, because waiver can only be made by submission at the time the court is asked to act. On the law as it stands today, the result is the same but the reasoning is narrower: a promise of marriage is not a commercial transaction, so no exception applies; and even if it were, the personal immunity of a serving Head of State is absolute while he holds office. Q's practical remedy is to invite K to submit, or to sue in the courts of his own State.

Article 71: where a treaty is void under Article 53, the parties must eliminate as far as possible the consequences of any act performed in reliance on the conflicting provision and bring their mutual relations into conformity with the norm; where it terminates under Article 64, the termination releases the parties from any obligation further to perform, without affecting rights created before termination, except that those rights may thereafter be maintained only to the extent that their maintenance does not itself conflict with the norm.

Article 66(a) gives any party to a dispute concerning Articles 53 or 64 the right to submit it to the International Court of Justice unless the parties agree to arbitration, which is the only compulsory jurisdiction in the whole Convention.

Examples. The Convention deliberately gives none, so as not to freeze the category. Those universally accepted, and listed in the International Law Commission's conclusions on peremptory norms (2022), are the prohibitions of aggression and the use of force, genocide, crimes against humanity, slavery and the slave trade, torture, apartheid and racial discrimination, the basic rules of international humanitarian law, piracy, and the right of self-determination.

Judicial recognition. Nicaragua v. United States (1986) treated the prohibition of the use of force as peremptory; Prosecutor v. Furundzija (ICTY, 1998) held the prohibition of torture to be jus cogens; Armed Activities on the Territory of the Congo (New Application: 2002) (2006) held the prohibition of genocide to be peremptory but confirmed that a peremptory norm does not by itself confer jurisdiction on the Court; Jurisdictional Immunities of the State (Germany v. Italy) (2012) held that a conflict with a peremptory norm does not displace the procedural rule of State immunity.

Conclusion. Jus cogens is the point at which international law ceased to be a purely consensual system. Every other rule can be excluded by agreement between the States concerned; a peremptory norm cannot, and a treaty that offends it is void whatever the parties intended. Its practical importance is less in the invalidation of treaties, of which there is no clear instance, than in the two places where the concept now does real work: the duty not to recognise a situation created by a serious breach of a peremptory norm under Article 41 of the Articles on State Responsibility, and the argument, still contested after Germany v. Italy, that peremptory norms should override procedural bars such as immunity and limitation.

It is called optional because acceptance is voluntary; it is called compulsory jurisdiction because, once two States have both accepted, either may bring the other before the Court without any further agreement. It originated in the Statute of the Permanent Court of International Justice in 1920, as a compromise between those who wanted genuinely compulsory jurisdiction and those who insisted on consent.

Reciprocity. The obligation is undertaken only in relation to any other State accepting the same obligation, and Article 36(3) permits declarations on condition of reciprocity. The practical consequence is that jurisdiction extends only so far as the two declarations coincide: a respondent may invoke a reservation contained in the applicant's declaration, even though it has made no such reservation itself. That is the rule applied in the Norwegian Loans case (1957) and in Interhandel (1959).

Reservations. Article 36(3) expressly allows a declaration to be made for a certain time, and States have in practice attached extensive reservations ratione materiae, ratione personae and ratione temporis. The commonest are the exclusion of disputes within domestic jurisdiction, of disputes with particular classes of State, of disputes arising out of hostilities, and of disputes for which the parties have agreed on another method of settlement.

How much jurisdiction it actually creates. Only about seventy-four States of the one hundred and ninety-three have declarations in force, and of the permanent members of the Security Council only the United Kingdom has one; the United States withdrew its declaration in 1985 after the Nicaragua judgment, and France in 1974 after the Nuclear Tests cases. The optional clause is therefore a modest source of jurisdiction compared with compromissory clauses in treaties, which are today the commonest basis on which cases reach the Court.

Conclusion. The optional clause is the nearest thing international law has to compulsory adjudication, and its history is a demonstration of how far that is from being very near. Because acceptance is voluntary, because reciprocity lets a respondent borrow the applicant's reservations, and because States have attached reservations wide enough to exclude everything they care about, the clause produces jurisdiction chiefly in disputes the parties were content to litigate anyway. That is not a criticism of the drafting but a statement of the character of the system: the Court's authority rests on consent, and Article 36(2) is a way of giving consent in advance rather than an escape from the requirement of it.

The institutional design confirms it. Article 24(1) confers on the Security Council primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security, and Members agree that in carrying out its duties the Council acts on their behalf. Article 25 obliges Members to accept and carry out its decisions, and Article 103 gives Charter obligations priority over any other international agreement. No other organ has powers of that kind: the General Assembly may only recommend, and Article 12 originally restrained it from making recommendations on a dispute while the Council was seised of it.

The powers are real. Chapter VI allows the Council to call on parties to settle disputes, to investigate under Article 34 and to recommend procedures or terms under Articles 36 and 37. Chapter VII allows it, after determining under Article 39 the existence of a threat to the peace, breach of the peace or act of aggression, to order provisional measures (40), measures not involving the use of armed force (41), including economic sanctions and the establishment of criminal tribunals, and action by air, sea or land forces (42). Article 51 preserves the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence until the Council has acted.

Whole chapters are devoted to the other purposes. Chapter IX, Articles 55 and 56, on international economic and social cooperation, by which Members pledge themselves to joint and separate action for higher standards of living, full employment, solutions of international economic, social and health problems, and universal respect for and observance of human rights. Chapter X on the Economic and Social Council. Chapters XI to XIII on non-self-governing territories and trusteeship, under which decolonisation was carried through: from 51 members in 1945 to 193 today, an achievement at least as large as anything done under Chapter VII.

The bulk of the system's work is not about war. The specialised agencies and programmes, the ILO, WHO, UNESCO, FAO, UNICEF, UNHCR, UNDP and UN Women, employ most of the staff and spend most of the money. The human rights machinery, from the Universal Declaration of 1948 to the nine core treaties, the Human Rights Council of 2006 and the Universal Periodic Review, is a body of work that did not exist before the Organization. The Sustainable Development Goals of 2015 are its current central programme.

Conclusion. The statement is half right, and the half it gets right is a statement about priority rather than about proportion. Peace and security is the first purpose of the Charter, it is the only field in which the Organization can take binding decisions, and it is the reason the Organization was founded in 1945. But it is not the whole, and it is not even the larger part of what the Organization does: the Charter itself names four purposes, devotes entire chapters to economic and social cooperation, human rights and decolonisation, and the practice of eighty years has expanded those far beyond what was foreseen. The better formulation is the one the Organization now uses itself: peace, development and human rights are its three pillars, and they are interdependent, because there is no development without security, no security without development, and neither without respect for human rights.