Chapter XVI of the United Nations Charter
Open-knowledge reference entry
Chapter XVI of the United Nations Charter contains miscellaneous provisions prohibiting secret treaties, establishing the UN Charter as supreme over any other treaties, and providing for privileges and immunities of UN officials and representatives.
Article 102
Article 102 bans secret treaties. Under this article, all international treaties must be registered with, and published by, the UN Secretariat. The article also states that secret treaties concluded in violation of this provision are unenforceable before UN bodies. Secret treaties were believed to have played a role in the events leading to World War I. Accordingly, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson had proposed banning them in the 1910s, and the League of Nations had created a special bureau of treaty registration under the League of Nations Secretary-General and had set aside a section of the League of Nations Journal for treaty publication. Article 18 of the Covenant of the League of Nations held that "Every treaty or international engagement entered into hereafter by any Member of the League shall be forthwith registered with the Secretariat and shall as soon as possible be published by it. No such treaty or international engagement shall be binding until so registered," so Article 102 is basically a continuation of this policy.
Article 103
Article 103 states that members' obligations under the UN Charter override their obligations under any other treaty. Thus, countries cannot use other treaties (such as the North Atlantic Treaty) to override their UN Charter obligations, a fact that has been used to question the legality of military actions conducted under regional treaty organization auspices, such as the 1999 NATO bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Similarly, the Greek Cypriot and Greek governments claimed that Turkish military intervention, although authorized under the 1960 Treaty of Guarantee to maintain the status quo in Cyprus (see Cyprus dispute), was banned by UN Charter's prohibitions against the use of force, which were supreme under Article 103.
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