Description
Since the creation of the United Nations and the establishment of the Security Council as the guardian of international peace and security much have changed. The humanisation of international law has developed new obligations for both States and their international organisations. Particularly, the emergence of R2P as a concept related to the prevention and sanction of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity has pointed out the necessity for an evolution of the international legal regulations, specifically, to the articles that regulate the Security Council in the Charter. Whereas different proposals have been presented before the United Nations General Assembly, none of them has been successful. For this reason, taking advantage of the strong support that the concept of Open Government has gained from the international community, as a new international public policy, this paper will suggest that to legitimate the decisions taken by the Security Council related to R2P, the decision process must be done under the principles of Open Government. This is to say, when the members of the Security Council must take any decision on whether to apply R2P or not, a process based on the principles of collaboration, transparency and participation must be applied. In this case, the members of the General Assembly would have a right to know the reasons used as a basis for any decision on R2P. Additionally, it will propose the use of the new information and communication technologies for sharing the decisions within the members of the international community. This will help to legitimise the conduct and actions of the permanent members of the Security Council before the international community and to guarantee that no other action would be taken unilaterally. Consequently, in any case that a state ignores the decision taken by the Security Council, even though the reasons of inaction have been explained, the rules of international responsibility must be applied to such state.
In this sense, transparency will work as a mechanism to overcome the continuous paralysis that the Security Council have been suffering due to political and economic interests as the permanent members will be obliged to base their vote on legal reasons and not on their interests.
The present research will use the deductive, systemic and comparative method to determine whether the principles of Open Government can be applied to the international relations and, if so, how it should be done. All in all, this paper looks for a resource to diminish the risk of delegitimating the role of the Security Council and the possible risk of the renaissance of unilateral intervention.
