International Civil Individual Responsibility and the Security Council: Building the Foundations of a General Regime

This Article focuses on a few tools at the disposal of the United Nations Security Council (“UNSC”) to enhance individual (read: civil) responsibility concerning nonstate terrorist actors with a view to opening other avenues of inquiry regarding other subversive nonstate actors (“NSAs”), for instance in the areas of transnational torts, human rights (“HR”) violations, and environmental damage caused by business entities. As discussed in Part V, recent developments surrounding the application of the Alien Tort Claims Act (“ATCA”) in the United States and the prospect of establishing a basis for universal civil jurisdiction further signal that no such solid basis exists in customary international law (or treaty law, for that matter) to hold corporations and individuals accountable for HR abuses, in large part because states are not willing to accept it. Therefore, these developments have created implementation and enforcement gaps in different areas related to civil recovery for violations of international law, of which terrorism-related wrongs form an important part.