A/HRC/19/33 of the breach and reparation in the interest of the injured State or of the beneficiaries of the obligation breached.33 23. Where the above criteria are fulfilled, unilateral coercive measures may be justified as a temporary measure. However, countermeasures must not affect the prohibition on the use of force, obligations for the protection of fundamental human rights, obligations of a humanitarian character prohibiting reprisals and other obligations under peremptory norms of general international law.34 They also must be proportional.35 The proportionality of the countermeasure is a crucial element in assessing the legality of a specific measure. (b) Authorization by the United Nations 24. According to Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations, the Security Council may impose forcible or non-forcible measures in situations that constitute at least a threat to international peace and security. 36 The preferred non-forcible measures adopted by the Security Council in the past were economic sanctions.37 States Members of the United Nations must implement such binding resolutions.38 This Charter-based obligation also overrides other obligations under international law. Although the wording of Article 103 of the Charter appears to be limited to other treaty obligations, the priority of the Charter obligations is generally regarded to apply also vis-à-vis custom and other obligations under general international law.39 25. Thus, coercive measures taken by States not unilaterally, but on the basis of a United Nations Chapter VII resolution may be legally justified even if they contravened treaty obligations or customary international law rules per se, unless such contraventions amounted to breaches of peremptory norms (jus cogens). B. Specific coercive measures 26. Human rights concerns as well as the humanitarian implications of general economic sanctions have led the Security Council, and also States when imposing unilateral coercive measures, to increasingly adopt so-called targeted or smart sanctions, which are aimed at avoiding the indiscriminate effects of general economic sanctions by specifically targeting individuals considered to be crucial to the policy decisions that are meant to be influenced by the coercive measures.40 27. While many human rights and international humanitarian law issues stemming from the indiscriminate effect of general economic measures can be avoided by the adoption of “targeted” sanctions, some novel human rights issues arise in this context. Coercive measures, such as the freezing of bank accounts of individual terror suspects or targeted regime leaders, may infringe upon their right to a fair trial if they have no or only inadequate possibilities to challenge such determinations, 41 as well as their rights to privacy 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 8 Ibid., art. 54 on measures taken by States other than an injured State. Ibid., art. 50, para. 1, on obligations not affected by countermeasures. Ibid., art. 51 on proportionality. Charter of the United Nations, Art. 39. Ibid., Art. 41. Ibid., Art. 25. Rudolf Bernhardt, “Article 103”, in Bruno Simma, ed., The Charter of the United Nations: A Commentary, vol. I, 2nd ed. (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002), para. 21. See para. 3 above. See for example the European Court of Justice, Kadi Case, Joined Cases C-402/05 P and C-415/05 P, Yassin Abdullah Kadi and Al Barakaat International Foundation v. Council and Commission,