From the Secretary-General.

• Position: Excerpts from Kofi Annan speech - Intervention by UN Security Council in internal affairs of states - Transcript

It has been 50 years since the United Nations first intervened in a situation of conflict and established the pattern and practice of peacekeeping. Today, the Organization steers its way to fresh, innovative and internationally acceptable definitions of that term - "intervention".

In these excerpts from the Ditchley Foundation Lecture delivered by him in the United Kingdom on 26 June 1998, Mr. Kofi Annan shares his own thoughts on the subject.

The United Nations is an association of sovereign States, and sovereign States do tend to be extremely jealous of their sovereignty. Small States, especially, are fearful of intervention in their affairs by great Powers. And indeed, our century has seen many examples of the strong "intervening" - or interfering-in the affairs of the weak, from the Allied intervention in the Russian civil war in 1918 to the Soviet "interventions" in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan.

Others might refer to the American intervention in Viet Nam, or even the Turkish intervention in Cyprus in 1974. The motives, and the legal justification, may be better in some cases than others, but the word "intervention" has come to be used almost as a synonym for "invasion".

The Charter of the United Nations gives great responsibilities to great Powers in their capacity as permanent members of the Security Council. But as a safeguard against abuse of those powers, Article 2.7 of the Charter protects national sovereignty even from intervention by the United Nations itself. That Article forbids the United Nations to intervene "in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any State". The very phrase "domestic dispute" sounds reassuring. It suggests a little local difficulty which the State in question can easily settle, if only it is left alone to do so.

This year we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The day before it adopted the Universal Declaration, the General Assembly had adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which puts all States under an obligation to "prevent and punish" this most heinous of crimes.

Since genocide is almost always committed with the connivance, if not the direct participation, of the State authorities, it is hard to see how the United Nations could prevent it without intervening in a State's internal affairs.

State frontiers should no longer be seen as a watertight protection for war criminals...