Over the past few years, the relationships between the United Nations (‘un’), regional and sub-regional organizations in maintaining peace and security in Africa have evolved. The African Union (‘au’) began coordinating enforcement actions conducted by African sub-regional organizations with the authorisation of the un Security Council (‘unsc’), which maintained its political control over them. The
un Charter and relevant legal regimes of those organizations seem to allow this kind of relationship. Such a trend may explain, in part, the unsc’s most recent practice of authorising regional and sub-regional enforcement actions under Chapter vii of the
un Charter, instead of Chapter viii. In carrying out those authorised military operations, African regional and/or sub-regional organizations perform their own statutory powers and pursue their own statutory objectives at the continental level. They do not act as ‘decentralised organs’ of the un.
In recent times, claims concerning violations of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination have been brought by States parties to the Convention to the attention of the International Court of Justice, and, for the first time in the course of United Nations human rights treaty bodies, to the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Relations between the different mechanisms of the sophisticated compliance control system set up by the Convention have been put to the test. In particular, the Qatar v. United Arab Emirates case raises the complex issue of parallel proceedings which, in the author’s opinion, can be dealt with by solutions offered by the Convention itself, rather than by the lis pendens principle.
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