Review essay: Quis judicabit? The Security Council, its powers and its legal control

With a metaphor that, like most metaphors, is not altogether accurate, the UN Security Council could be described as a whale which, for reasons known and unknown, lay quietly somewhere on the high seas for most of its life. Some ten years ago, the whale awoke and turned over once or twice, sending waves to distant shores which, in turn, set in motion the ships and boats and canoes of legal science. They are still nervously cruising while the whale, as it turned out, did not really leave its place. In the years after 1990, the activism the Security Council demonstrated for the first time in its history gave rise to the question whether the body's powers under Chapter VII of the UN Charter are virtually unlimited, how far the Council can extend the scope of its activities, and whether there are sufficient means of legal control. In a foreword introducing one of the books reviewed in this essay, 1 Judge Rosalyn Higgins phrased this question in the following way: