United Nations

As the premier international lawmaking body, the United Nations (U.N.) plays a key role in combating international terrorism. However, even though the U.N.'s General Assembly passed one of the most comprehensive resolutions against terrorism in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon just outside Washington, D.C., the international community continues its 30-year struggle to agree on a working definition of terrorism.

The U.N. Charter, which laid out basic principles of international relations, established the U.N. on October 24, 1945. At its founding, the U.N. had 51 member countries; it now has 190 members. Each member has a seat and a vote in the General Assembly. The U.N. has five other permanent bodies, including the 15-member Security Council, which is responsible for peacekeeping and international security and is thus intimately involved in issues of terrorism. (China, France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Russia are permanent members of the Security Council; representatives of 10 other countries are elected by the General Assembly).

International terrorism became an issue for the U.N. during the spate of hijackings in the 1960s. In response to the first hijacking (May 1961), the U.N. held the Convention on Offences and Certain Other Acts Committed on Board Aircraft—its first high-level meeting on terrorism; from this meeting came a resolution empowering an aircraft commander to act to subdue anyone trying to hijack or jeopardize the flight and requiring countries to take custody of the offenders. In 1970, another U.N. convention issued a resolution that required hijackers to be prosecuted or extradited. This piecemeal approach to the problem of terrorism—focusing on terrorist tools, such as hijacking, instead of on terrorism as a whole—would continue for decades to come.

The U.N.'s inability to define international terrorism gave rise to this kind of legislation. In 1972, the year of the attack on the Israeli athletes during the Olympics in Munich, Germany, U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim put terrorism on the General Assembly's agenda, under the heading, “Measures to prevent terrorism and other forms of violence which endanger or take innocent lives or jeopardize fundamental freedoms.” Several countries, including Australia, Canada, Great Britain, Italy, and Japan, also sponsored a proposal in the U.N.'s legal committee to establish guidelines to punish and prevent terrorism. Concurrently, a second group of predominantly African and Middle Eastern countries proposed that the U.N. focus on the causes of terrorism. When the second proposal was adopted, Waldheim's already lengthy agenda title was amended to include “and study of the underlying causes of those forms of terrorism and acts of violence which lie in misery, frustration, grievance and despair and which cause some people to sacrifice human lives, including their own, in an attempt to effect radical changes.” U.S. president Richard Nixon's proposal for an international treaty against the spread of terrorism beyond areas of conflict foundered in the midst of that debate.