1. Article 51 of the UN Charter states that Members of the United Nations that respond with force to an armed attack shall “immediately” report their actions to the Security Council. Our institutional model 2 goes significantly beyond Article 51 in three ways: it expands the scope of a reporting requirement beyond the case of self-defense against an actual armed attack to cover preventive force; it specifies that the report must be made by an impartial body and must explicitly address issue of fact and of reasonableness in the justification of the use of force; and it attaches penalties in the case of an unfavorable report. Article 51, in contrast, allows the party using force to report on itseIf specifies no criteria of evaluation for the report, and mentions no consequences of an unfavorable report
2. The notion of an “imminent” attack is somewhat vague but is usually understood to include not only situations in which missiles or warplanes have been launched but have not yet struck their targets, but also situations in which forces have been mobilized with apparently aggressive intent
3. By beginning with the assumption that the use of force is sometimes permissible to stop massive violations of basic human rights already under way, we are of course implicitly rejecting the absolute pacifist view that the use of military force is never justified because it inevitably involves harm to innocent persons. We share this assumption with the four perspectives that we criticize