2 - The Ever-Expanding Legislative Supremacy of the Security Council in Counterterrorism

Summary

The legal regulation of terrorism has posed significant challenges to the integrity and legitimacy of global legal order for many decades. While acknowledging that the Security Council had been reasonably active on counterterrorism issues for decades prior to 9/11, this chapter starts from the assessment that there were distinct limitations to the scope and breadth of its action. The events of 9/11 marked a distinct shift in this regulatory status quo. While treaty making was dominant in the regulation of terrorism pre-9/11, it has been overtaken by the assertive role taken by the Security Council in regulating state responses to terrorism through Security Council Resolutions. This chapter will argue that these combined shifts have had a distinctly negative effect on the overall advancement of meaningful protection for human rights in the counterterrorism sphere. In parallel, the analysis asserts that such profound legislative shifts at the global level have displaced and negatively affected well-entrenched constitutional and domestic protections for human rights embedded in the national legal systems of many countries. In this supremacy model of Security Council action in the counter-terrorism arena, domestic human rights and constitutional protections are being rendered irrelevant or powerless in the new regulatory landscape.