Enhancing Community Accountability of the Security Council through Pluralistic Structure: The Case of the 1267 Committee

Abstract

The permeation of the UN Security Council’s activities into the domestic sphere and their greater involvement at the individual level have given rise to the need for enhancing accountability to wider constituencies in international society — what this article terms community accountability. Although international law has yet to systematically guide the questions of who ought to be accountability holders and what accountability standards apply, the development of accountability standards and procedures is possible for the UN in the decentralized international community without recourse to institutionalized settings such as the case of judicial review of Security Council resolutions. This paper illuminates the role of decentralized standard-setting processes through the analysis of the accountability mechanism of the 1267 Sanctions Committee for the Al Qaeda sanctions regime. The level of accountability discharged by the 1267 Committee has been challenged both by member states and by the targeted individuals and entities; and the Security Council and the 1267 Committee have made incremental efforts to respond to them from the sanctions’ early stages. While the accountability calls against the Council are susceptible to dilution, the use of national courts by the targeted individuals and entities helped attract parallel, if not in consort, contestations from states and the wider UN membership. These challenges made in consort, and the responses made to the administration of the Al Qaeda sanctions regime, have generated and established the accountability standards of fairness and transparency applicable to the listing and delisting procedure. The standard is likely to guide procedural improvements in the future, including a mechanism to review the Committee’s listing decisions, and to further stimulate constant challenges, which spring from the decentralized structure of the international community, as well as continue to develop the community accountability of the UN Security Council.