ON THE UN’S LEGAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE IRREGULAR ADMISSION OF

Abstract

Macedonia’s admission to UN membership in April 1993 General Assembly GA Resolution 47/225 1993 1, pursuant to the Security Council SC Resolution 817 1993 2 recommending such admission came with two conditions in addition to those explicitly provided in Article 4 1 of the UN Charter, namely the candidate’s acceptance of: i being provisionally referred to as the ‘Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia’ for all purposes within the United Nations and ii of negotiating with another country over its name.3 These impositions are part of the resolutions, which also recognised explicitly in SC Resolution 817 that the applicant fulfils the standard criteria of Article 4 1 of the Charter required for admission. In a recent paper4, we analysed the legal nature of the additional conditions imposed on Macedonia for its admission to UN membership in the context of the advisory opinion of International Court of Justice ICJ given in 1948 regarding the conditions for admission of a state to the United Nations.5 The General Assembly subsequently accepted the ICJ’s advisory.6 There we concluded that the attachment of conditions i and ii to those specified in Article 4 1 of the Charter for the admission of Macedonia to UN membership is in violation of the Charter.