By Nicolas J. S. Davies
NEW YORK | 12 October 2026 (IDN) — On 9 October 2026, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Navi Pillay, the South African international lawyer who defended Nelson Mandela and the anti-apartheid political prisoners on Robben Island, and went on to serve as a judge on the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the International Criminal Court (ICC), and as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. In 2025, Navi Pillay led the UN Commission of Inquiry that confirmed that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
With the world in the grip of seemingly intractable war and chaos, the Nobel Committee clearly wanted to honour someone who has worked against the tide of militarism and violence to uphold international law. Yet, on the same day, the United States unveiled unilateral, illegal coercive measures, or “sanctions”, against the ICC, where Navi Pillay served as a judge from 2003 to 2008.
The UN Charter and the Limits of Accountability
The UN General Assembly’s 2026 general debate in September also set out to uphold the UN Charter and international law, and to confront the reality that the UN system is failing in its most basic responsibility, to maintain international peace and security.
The UN Charter’s foundational rules require countries to resolve disputes peacefully and refrain from the threat or use of force. But in the General Assembly debate, even as leaders recognised the urgent need to finally enforce the UN Charter, after decades of impunity for aggression and war crimes, they were reluctant to explicitly address the central role of the United States in undermining the rule of international law.
Many US allies loyally condemned Russia’s violation of the UN Charter against Ukraine. But none of them even tried to square their singular focus on Russia with the inconvenient truth that their own ally, the United States, has systematically violated the UN Charter for decades, against Grenada, Nicaragua, Panama, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran and other countries.
While US allies remain silent, US officials accept no responsibility or accountability for the violence and chaos they unleash, and instead keep doubling down on their failed imperial ambitions and military approach to international disputes, the very antithesis of what the UN Charter requires.
Many other leaders spoke out, but without explicitly naming the United States. Algeria’s foreign minister, the veteran diplomat Ahmed Attaf, pointedly asked,
“What sort of international order can function properly when principles are selected according to the identity of those who violate them? What confidence can remain in international law when the aggressor is granted the right to self-defence, while the victim is required to justify even the right to survive?”
So it is left to the officials of the countries the United States threatens or attacks to remind the world which country is illegally threatening them, as Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla and Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian did clearly and accurately at the General Assembly.
Many other leaders made strong statements condemning Israel’s war crimes and genocide in Gaza, even as they neglected to condemn the essential US military and diplomatic role in them. King Abdullah of Jordan described Israel’s objective as “to make a viable Palestinian state impossible,” through “a system of subjugation… de facto annexation… forced displacement… (and) war crimes.”
“We have tools,” he reminded his colleagues, “Sanctions, asset freezes, embargoes, diplomatic isolation. And we have a record of using them elsewhere… The question now is: Will we act?”
Can the General Assembly Act on Palestine?
Another of the UN’s tools is the power of the president of the UN General Assembly to convene Emergency Special Sessions (ESS) that can pass “uniting for peace” resolutions. This allows the General Assembly to act decisively on international problems when the Security Council fails to do so, wielding the kind of tools that King Abdullah outlined.
The General Assembly’s 10th Emergency Special Session on “Illegal Israeli Actions in Occupied East Jerusalem and the Rest of the Occupied Palestinian Territory” began in 1997, and has been reconvened more than twenty times.
In 2022, the 10th Emergency Special Session voted to ask the International Court of Justice (ICJ) some legal questions about the Israeli occupation, which the court answered in 2024, in a finding that the Israeli occupation is illegal and that Israel must “end its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory as rapidly as possible,” and “evacuate all settlers.”
The next meeting of the 10th ESS in September 2024 passed a resolution demanding that Israel comply with the ICJ ruling and withdraw from the occupied territories within a year.
However, the 2025-26 General Assembly president, Annalena Baerbock of Germany, let her entire year as president pass without reconvening the 10th ESS even once.
This allowed Trump and Netanyahu to seize the initiative and subject the people of Gaza to a new phase of the genocide under Trump’s Orwellian “board of peace,” a smokescreen for a war of attrition to keep killing civilians and making life intolerable for the people of Gaza, as they struggle to survive in the rubble of their bombed and bulldozed homes.
Many leaders at the General Assembly spoke of the urgent need to reform the Security Council. Still, their greatest leverage is the General Assembly’s ability to convene an Emergency Special Session when the dysfunctional, corrupt Security Council fails to act. Nowhere in the world is such action more urgently needed than in Palestine. And yet the 10th Emergency Special Session has not met since June 2025.
Now that Bangladesh’s Dr Khalilur Rahman has taken Baerbock’s place as President of the General Assembly, he should reconvene the 10th Emergency Special Session to take concrete action for Palestine that people worldwide are calling for.
South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the ICJ is also important. Still, South Africa has slowed down the already tortuous pace of international justice by requesting 18 months to respond to Israel’s defence against genocide charges. Surely South Africa and the court can find a way to move faster, with the fate of an entire people at stake. The Genocide Convention was intended to prevent and stop genocide, not just to pass judgment over mass graves and scattered refugee camps.
The Hague’s Judgment on Kosovo
Many people justifiably fear that the United Nations and its institutions are too weak to enforce the laws of the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions and hold the United States and Israel accountable for their crimes. But there was another event on 16 September, 2026, which suggests that Benjamin Netanyahu and other US-allied war criminals might want to think twice before assuming that the United States will always shield them from accountability.
The week before the General Assembly met in New York, an international war crimes court in The Hague sentenced former Kosovo president Hashim Thaçi to 25 years in prison. The court found Thaçi and three other former leaders of the US-backed Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) guilty of 96 murders, 303 charges of torture, 49 charges of criminal cruelty and 385 cases of arbitrary detention, committed during the US-NATO war on Yugoslavia in 1999.
The Kosovo Specialist Chambers, the court that tried Thaçi, was established in 2011, in response to a Council of Europe Parliamentary Report titled “Inhuman Treatment of People and Illicit Trafficking in Human Organs in Kosovo.”
That report detailed extraordinary allegations unearthed by Carla Del Ponte, Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which the Council of Europe then investigated through Swiss state prosecutor and member of parliament Dick Marty.
The report substantiated allegations that the KLA transported civilian prisoners from Kosovo to Albania and imprisoned them in a clinic known as the “Yellow House,” where they murdered them and extracted their internal organs to sell on the illicit organ transplant market.
As the court records show, these were only the most startling of Thaçi and the KLA’s crimes. The KLA also shot, tortured or beat to death dozens, or maybe hundreds, of civilian prisoners whom it labelled as “traitors” or “collaborators,” during and immediately after NATO’s illegal war to detach Kosovo from the remaining territory of Yugoslavia.
While no Americans were charged in these crimes, the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies had worked with the KLA since at least 1996, as it terrorised Serb civilians and attacked and killed Yugoslav police to provoke repression against the Kosovar Albanian population.
The escalating violence in Kosovo provided the pretext for a war in which the United States and NATO dropped 23,000 bombs and missiles on Yugoslavia, targeting and destroying vital civilian infrastructure as well as military targets. Then they invaded and occupied Kosovo and built a huge US military base, Camp Bondsteel, which the US also used as a secret prison during its “war on terror.”
US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was so personally invested in the march to war in Kosovo that Time dubbed it “Madeleine’s War.” Albright shunned the traditional political leaders of Kosovo’s independence movement, and instead embraced Hashim Thaçi and the KLA as the United States’ and NATO’s main allies in Kosovo, despite their well-known links to organised crime and heroin smuggling.
With Thaçi at her side at the Rambouillet conference in France, Albright delivered her coup de grace to Yugoslav President Milosevic: an ultimatum that would have given NATO the right to militarily occupy all the remaining territory of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
Milosevic’s refusal to surrender his country’s sovereignty served as the final pretext for the US and NATO to violate the UN Charter in an illegal war that set a precedent for US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the endless wars and chaos that have followed.
Will Governments Use the Tools of International Law?
At the UN General Assembly on 23 September, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić thanked the 107 countries that still refuse to recognise Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia in 2008, and he placed NATO’s war on the remains of Yugoslavia in 1999 squarely at the root of the violence and chaos afflicting the UN and the world.
“…the order based on respect for the UN Charter and the law founded upon it no longer exists,” Vučić said. “It was destroyed by those who tore apart the territories of other countries for the sake of their own political and economic interests. They did so unscrupulously, recklessly, and shamelessly.”
So is it already too late to try to enforce the rules of the UN Charter?
Has the world failed to learn the lesson of 1945 that “might makes right,” coupled with the destructive power of modern weapons, can only create a world plagued by endless war and chaos?
Or, now that we are staring that world in the face, will we finally heed that lesson and choose differently?
It has taken 27 years for justice to catch up with Hashim Thaçi, but, as King Abdullah said, the world’s governments have the tools to enforce the rules of international law if and when they choose, and that is true even in the case of US allies like Thaçi and Netanyahu.
But Abdullah’s question remains: will the world’s leaders choose to use the tools at their disposal? First to free Palestine, but also to give our own children and grandchildren the chance to build a peaceful, sustainable world out of the militarism, war and chaos that is the global legacy of a generation of American leaders.
Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq and, with Medea Benjamin, of War In Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, now in a revised, updated 2nd edition.