"United Nations Special Rapporteur Idriss Jazairy sharply criticized the Trump administration's decision to reimpose sanctions against Iran after the withdrawal of the United States from the Iran nuclear deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action ("JCPOA"). 'The reimposition of sanctions against Iran after the unilateral withdrawal of the United States from the Iran nuclear deal, which had been unanimously adopted by the Security Council with the support of the US itself, lays bare the illegitimacy of this action,' Mr. Jazairy charged...
Mr. Jazairy's assertion that only the Security Council has the authority to impose sanctions is wrong. There is nothing in the UN Charter that gives such exclusive power to the Security Council or to any other UN body. The Security Council has 'primary' responsibility under Article 24 of the UN Charter to act on behalf of the member states to try to maintain international peace and security. However, the member states do not lose their own sovereign powers to act, particularly after they have given the Security Council ample opportunity to enforce its own resolutions. The Security Council has failed to hold the Iranian regime to account for violating the terms of the very same Security Council resolution that endorsed the JCPOA. The UN Charter does not-and indeed cannot-take away the sovereign right of each member state to make the ultimate decision as to how to defend its own citizens. The Iranian regime's continued development and testing of increasingly longer range ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear weapons represents a potential threat to the security of the American people, as North Korea's unchecked and more advanced intercontinental ballistic program has demonstrated. Nowhere does the UN Charter compel a member state to get permission from the Security Council before making the sovereign decision to impose or re-impose under its domestic laws economic sanctions in its own national security interest...
. It is time to retire the romantic fiction that the United Nations is the only claimant to multilateral "legitimacy." Nor can we expect that a dictatorial regime such as the Iranian Islamist theocracy will ever adhere to the mutual rules-based, verifiable commitments necessary to form a durable multilateral agreement, whether or not the UN endorsed it such as it did with the JCPOA. The Iranian regime's real objective at every turn is to game the system. The Trump administration has taken the first steps to move away from being overly entangled in the UN's flawed institutions gamed by Iran and to assert U.S. leadership of the free world once again."