A/HRC/30/45 E. Contribution to strengthen the capacity of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to provide technical assistance and advisory services to affected countries 57. Pursuant to his mandate, the Special Rapporteur will contribute to backstopping the capacity of OHCHR to provide affected countries with technical assistance and advisory services. Consultations have been initiated with OHCHR to determine the modalities of the special procedure’s involvement in this important area 58. The mandate-holder will investigate the possibility and acceptability of including reporting on unilateral coercive measures and on their human rights impact as part of the universal periodic review process and to organize a cross-cutting mainstreaming session of the Human Rights Council on this theme VIII. Conclusion 59. Only multilateral sanctions approved by the Security Council comply with the letter and spirit of the Charter of the United Nations, which is the bond between all States Members of the United Nations. The political reality, however, has departed from the ideals of the founding fathers based on a vision of the unity of purpose of the victors of the Second World War. Thus, it soon became obvious that the veto powers devolved to the five permanent members of the Security Council would, on occasion, prevent it from adopting sanctions when these were necessary if only to protect innocent populations from abuse of their human rights, or the procedure in the Council for adopting sanctions was too lengthy while the need to resort to coercive measures brooked no delay. It was to be expected that unilateral coercive measures would be adopted to remedy such deficiencies. 60. However, the question remains as to whether such measures would still be legitimate if the Security Council had already taken action and adopted appropriate sanctions in good time. This is open to debate, but there are strong legal arguments that support a negative answer. It has been argued that: From the moment when the Council occupies itself with the adoption of mandatory sanctions, Member States transform into agents for the execution of these sanctions, their duty being to implement them in good faith without undermining their effective application. For States not individually injured, this implies an obligation to suspend measures already adopted at the individual level if they are different or incompatible with the measures decided by the Council, or in any case, to modify them in order to harmonize them with United Nations sanctions. A fortiori, the States in question should not adopt collective countermeasures after the pronouncement of mandatory sanctions but only measures that are necessary and sufficient for the execution of those mandatory sanctions. In short, unless the Council invites States to go further than its own measures — a rare event in practice — the triggering of Chapter VII ends the power of States not individually injured to react as they please at the individual level.45 45 L.A. Sicilianos, “Countermeasures in Response to Grave Violations of Obligations Owed to the International Community”, The Law of International Responsibility (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 1142. 17

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