The United Nations Charter promised a world in which sovereignty would shield states from conquest, partition, and protectorates. Today, that sovereignty system is being quietly rewritten from within the U.N. Security Council itself. In a tripolar world dominated by the United States, China, and Russia, the Council is drifting from guardian of sovereign equality to manager of spheres of influence — a kind of emerging tripartite entente that legitimates domination while claiming to enforce international law.
It may look like a marginal beginning — a territory below the global radar and a people numbering fewer than a million — but this is how illegality is normalized: through small exceptions at the periphery that, step by step, become precedents for the center. On Oct. 31, the U.N. Security Council adopted Resolution 2797 to extend the longstanding U.N. mission in Western Sahara.
In doing so, it formally endorsed Morocco’s 2007 Autonomy Plan “as basis for a just, lasting, and mutually acceptable solution” for the territory’s future status. That plan treats Western Sahara as having “genuine autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty,” while denying any possibility of Sahrawi statehood. The resolution noted the support expressed by “many Member States” for the Autonomy Plan, as if such support had any significance.
Eleven members of the Security Council voted in favor of the resolution; China, Russia, and Pakistan abstained, and Algeria did not participate in the vote. In effect, the Council’s action appeared to dent the erga omnes, jus cogens right to self-determination of the Sahrawi people, even as it endorsed the sovereignty of a state that, according to the consistent view of the International Court of Justice, has been its illegal occupier since 1975.
Then came Resolution 2803, adopted on Nov. 17, concerning Gaza. This resolution envisioned “a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood” but only subject to conditions which “may finally be in place” after the “faithfully carrying out” of a “PA reform program” and progress in the redevelopment of Gaza, all under the “oversight and supervision” of a “Board of Peace,” headed and chaired by President Donald J. Trump, with other members yet to be announced. What an indeterminate path to statehood for a people whose state has already been widely recognized, and whose right to self-determination consistently confirmed by the ICJ! And which people will be next in line to be told that their territory is to be assigned to another U.N. member? Perhaps the people of Ukraine?
The U.N. Security Council’s inability in recent years to contain escalating threats to international peace and security has prompted comparisons with the failures of the League of Nations in the years leading up to World War II. But the resolutions concerning Western Sahara and Gaza evoke memories of even earlier, no less dark times — the days of colonial carve-ups reminiscent of the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference. Trump’s personal control — and his family’s financial interests in the background — bring memories of the Berlin Conference’s recognition of King Leopold as the king-sovereign — the owner — of the Congo Free State: a regime that cloaked private extraction in the language of international legitimacy.
It is as if the world has slipped back into a bleaker era in which international institutions morph into instruments that ratify systemic domination. Classical Greece already offers a warning: the Delian League, a multilateral alliance led by Athens, has, under the shadow of an ever-impending Persian attack, gradually transformed into an Athenian empire. Today, it is the U.N. Security Council that has been repurposed, from a body entrusted with maintaining international peace and security into a tool of three dominant actors — the United States, China, and Russia — to allocate sovereign spoils while bestowing the imprimatur of legality on the outcome. If, in the past, the United States and others were accused of steering the Council, or using their veto power, to serve their partisan interests against specific states such as Iraq or Libya, this emerging tacit tripartite arrangement has all the hallmarks of what might become a relatively stable regime that corrodes a rules-based order grounded in sovereign equality. Seen from this angle, the comparison with the League of Nations in the 1930s flatters the earlier body: for all its failings, the League did insist on these principles in the face of aggression, expelling or censuring states that violated the sovereignty of others.
To understand the scope of the risk, the lesser-known case of the Western Sahara conflict is illustrative, with its historical and legal background (discussed also here and here) leading up to the October 2025 resolution. As I will explain, this resolution, similar to the one about Gaza, poses a foundational challenge to the current international legal order and to the Westphalian notion of sovereign equality.
Western Sahara 1975-2025
Western Sahara is a vast stretch of desert on Africa’s Atlantic coast. It has been on the U.N.’s list of “non-self-governing territories” since 1963. In 1975, as Spain prepared to end its colonial administration and withdraw from what was then called Spanish Sahara, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued an advisory opinion: the Sahrawi people, it said, have the right to determine their own future through genuine self-determination. Historical ties to Morocco were not enough to give Rabat sovereignty over the territory. In simple terms, the land and its future belonged to the Sahrawis.
Morocco ignored that judgment. Within months, King Hassan II orchestrated the “Green March,” sending hundreds of thousands of Moroccan civilians across the border. The four- day march (Nov. 6-9, 1975) precipitated the Madrid Agreement between Spain, Morocco, and Mauritania (the two neighboring States), signed on Nov. 14. The agreement handed administrative control of the territory to Morocco and Mauritania, which then divided the area between them. Mauritania withdrew a few years later; Morocco simply moved in and annexed the rest.
For decades, the U.N. formally held the line. In 1979, the General Assembly “deeply deplore[d]” the occupation, urged Morocco to terminate it, and reaffirmed the Sahrawis’ right to a referendum on independence. Over the years, many countries recognized the Sahrawi claim, and the Organization of African Unity admitted the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic as a formal member in 1984. In 1991, the Security Council created a mission — MINURSO — specifically to organize the referendum. Polisario’s proposal for the election was ignored. The vote never happened. Morocco entrenched its control, settled its own citizens in the territory, and exploited Western Sahara’s vast phosphate, cobalt, copper, zinc, fisheries, and other resources.
Still, at least on paper, international law remains clear: Western Sahara is not part of Morocco, and its people have not yet chosen their political future, as is their right under the U.N. Charter as a non-self-governing people. According to the ICJ’s consistent Advisory Opinions (here and here), the U.N. has the duty to facilitate that process, and it and all other states are obliged to not recognize as lawful what amounts to an illegal act of annexation. The African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights stated in a 2022 judgment (para. 305) related to Western Sahara that Article 20 of the African Charter concerning the right to self-determination “imposes an international obligation on all State Parties to take positive measures to ensure the realisation of the [Sahrawis’] right, including by giving assistance to oppressed peoples in their struggle for freedom and refraining from engaging in actions that are incompatible with the nature or full enjoyment of the right.” The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) held that the EU’s trade agreements with Morocco had to be renegotiated insofar as they failed to properly consider the interests of the people of Western Sahara (Paras. 153-160).
Despite these clear principles, the past few years have seen a dramatic shift in international politics over Western Sahara. Morocco had become a key economic partner of the United States and the European Union and a major ally in controlling migration from Africa. Since 1996, the EU has entered into several trade agreements with Morocco that applied de facto also to the territory of Western Sahara (see here and here).
Beginning around 2020, major powers and institutions began to recognize — or at least acquiesce to — Morocco’s claims in a way never seen before. For example, in December 2020, citing Morocco’s decision to normalize relations with Israel (in the more general context of the Abraham Accords), the outgoing first Trump administration officially recognized Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara and embraced the Moroccan autonomy proposal as “the only basis for a just and lasting solution.” The Biden administration, committed to the Abraham Accords, maintained this stance into 2025.
Key European states followed suit. In late 2021, Germany’s Foreign Ministry praised Morocco’s autonomy plan as an “important contribution” to resolving the conflict. In the same year, Spain formally stated that it now regarded the autonomy plan as “the most serious, realistic and credible basis” for a settlement. In 2024, President Emmanuel Macron declared that for France “this territory’s present and future fall under Morocco’s sovereignty.” The United Kingdom joined this chorus in mid-2025, with Foreign Secretary David Lammy calling autonomy within Morocco “the most credible, viable and pragmatic basis” for peace in the Sahara. In the midst of those developments in Europe, Israel — no doubt seeing a clear parallel to the Palestine question — formally recognized Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara in July 2023. Dozens of states have by now opened consulates in the Sahrawi cities of Dakhla and Laayoune, signalling de facto acceptance of Moroccan rule.
Into this context came the U.N. Security Council’s Resolution 2797 in October. In support of their positive vote, states described the outcome as pragmatic. After years of stalemate, they said, surely autonomy within Morocco is a “just and lasting” solution. The United States, France, and the United Kingdom all used variations of that phrase as they backed the resolution. According to France’s representative, the vote reflected “a growing international consensus” that the result was “the only basis for achieving a just, lasting and negotiated political solution, in accordance with the resolutions of the Council” and therefore, “[i]t was important for the Council to seize this momentum” as “a collective success.” Both Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog were quick to praise Morocco’s autonomy plan as endorsed by the Security Council. Morocco celebrated Oct. 31 as “Unity Day,” a national holiday to mark what its king called “a new and victorious chapter in the process of enshrining the Moroccan character of the Sahara,” language that leaves one doubting what “genuine autonomy for the Sahrawi people” could ever look like.
Legal Conundrum: What Future for Peremptory Norms?
Deeply entrenched in international law, the right of peoples to self-determination is still undisputedly a peremptory rule of international law — binding on all states and on international organizations, including the U.N. itself. The ICJ has repeatedly affirmed that right, including in the context of Western Sahara (also here), and Palestine. No occupying power, no former colonial ruler, no group of great powers sitting in New York may dictate the outcome of the exercise of the right.
Yet at the same time, the U.N. Charter obliges member states to comply with binding Security Council decisions under Article 25. The ICJ has repeatedly affirmed that when the Council acts under its Charter authority, its resolutions are binding on all U.N. members.
Member states now face a troubling choice: whether to follow the letter of the new Council resolutions (on Western Sahara and Gaza), or to uphold the higher-order rules of self-determination and non-recognition that the Council appears to violate (and possibly acting ultra vires under the Charter, as argued here and here). The law is clear; the real question is whether states will dare to challenge the legality of Security Council resolutions — and for how long the ICJ and other courts will hold the line before they are drained of power as was the WTO Appellate Body.
Institutional Conundrum: Whither the U.N. as Trustee of the Law-Based Order?
Today’s world is shaped by an uneasy rivalry among three nuclear powers – the United States, China, and Russia – each presiding over its own circle of clients and security partners. In this tripolar order, the U.N., formally entrusted with safeguarding international peace and security, risks being transformed into a mechanism for managing spheres of influence, conferring an aura of legality on arrangements that resemble modern protectorates.
One might have expected other member states to resist the tripartite subjugation of the Security Council. The three superpowers couldn’t do without France and the United Kingdom on board, as well as the active support of at least six more states voting in favor (or four non-permanent members, if China and Russia joined the vote rather than simply did not veto). And indeed, only two of the other non-permanent Council members did not join. Those who gave their support might have relinquished their agency in exchange for short-term gains. Within and beyond the U.N., through the use — or threat — of force or economic sanctions, and through a growing indifference to the fate of lesser allies, the rivalry among the three powers paradoxically strengthens the trio by deepening the dependency of small and medium-sized states while eroding the very norms that protect them. Those states, in turn, are trading their votes for immediate benefits: migration deals, arms sales, energy contracts, new technologies, or flimsy promises of protection.
The bargain may seem attractive in the moment, but it is profoundly shortsighted. The core norms that Western Sahara puts at stake — sovereignty, territorial integrity, and self-determination — are precisely those on which middle and smaller states most depend. The United States, China, and Russia possess nuclear weapons and vast military capabilities to secure themselves. States like Spain, Brazil, South Africa, or Indonesia do not. They rely on the principle that borders cannot be redrawn by force and that peoples cannot be permanently absorbed without their consent.
For decades, many international lawyers took comfort in a particular safeguard built into the system. Sovereignty, territorial integrity, and self-determination are said to be peremptory rules that cannot be brushed aside except — as the International Law Commission recently proposed (as part of its draft conclusions on identification and legal consequences of peremptory norms of general international law (jus cogens)) — by an overwhelming, “very large and representative majority of states.” In practice, that formula placed a special trust in the world’s middle powers. They were the ones presumed to have the greatest interest in defending these rules, precisely because they lack nuclear umbrellas or permanent seats on the Security Council. And they have the ability to block offensive Security Council resolutions: while the de-facto tripartite alliance can block resolutions they do not like, they need at least six other smaller states to support them.
The dissonance between the Council’s stance and the legal principles the U.N. itself helped articulate could still galvanize other parts of the system — the 12 other members of the Security Council, as well as the General Assembly, regional organizations, courts, and civil society — to assert the Sahrawis’ rights more forcefully. That would mean countries in Europe outside the tight circle of permanent members, together with influential states in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, deliberately coordinating their positions. It would also mean drawing a clear red line against similar arrangements elsewhere — resisting any future attempt to dress up faits accomplis in Gaza, Ukraine, Taiwan, or other contested territories as “realistic” autonomy solutions that entrench conquest.
The prospects of such a middle-power pact are dubious given historical animosities and the temptation for short-term gains, especially among populist leaders. Nevertheless, the writing is on the wall for all, and herein lies a hope: for donning the mantle of perceived legality, the Tripartite Entente requires the cooperation of at least six other Security Council members, among them middle and even small powers. It is therefore apt to remind them of the somber warning Algeria’s ambassador delivered to the U.N. during the October debate on Resolution 2797: “Imagine if this framework were to be replicated in other conflict zones in Europe, the Americas, Asia or Africa,” he said. “That would cause dangerous damage to one of the main pillars of the very edifice of the international order.”
