Abstract

International legal scholars of the UN law have more often than not been amazed by the legislative resolutions adopted by the UN Security Council. This role taken by the Council is rather new, and in-depth theoretical and practical analyses thereof have been found wanting and many fundamentals therein perplexing. For example, constitutively, although there are some good discussions around well-known legislative resolutions like Resolutions 1373 (count-terrorism) and 1540 (non-proliferation), no authors have written about what a legislative resolution is and what elements exactly make such a resolution “legislative”. The prevailing trend is to take for granted this “using-your-gut” way of claiming a resolution to be legislative. This barrier makes it objectively implausible to legitimatize or illegitimatize the Council’s new role in the first place, which further makes future review and regulation of these “so-called” legislative resolutions unachievable. Also, international legal scholars usually investigate this topic merely from a legal perspective, while little attention has been paid to settle this legal issue against a backdrop of the Council and the UN as a tactfully synthesized international society constituted by individual political components, i.e., Member States. To fill in the gaps mentioned above, this article adopted a historically and jurisprudentially comparative approach to deconstruct legislative resolutions. It unprecedentedly deducted a straightforward formula with dissected elements to hand-pick legislative resolutions. This article also went a step further with sociopolitical reasoning to provide theoretical and practical rebuttals to the voices that tried to illegalize this new role, offering a heavier layer of sociopolitical probing beneath the surface of the common legal rationale.