An essay marking the eighty-first anniversary of the signing of the Charter of the United Nations, 26 June,1945
Munir Omer Mohamed (LL.B; LL.M)
I. Two Cities, One Summer
In the summer of 1945 two cities decided the shape of a century. One of them knew it. The other was not invited.
On 26 June 1945, in San Francisco, the representatives of fifty nations signed the Charter of the United Nations. They promised the peoples of the earth three great things: peace, the self-determination of peoples, and the sovereign equality of states. These were grand words. For some peoples they described the world. For others they named only a hope.
Eritrea was among the others. In June 1945 it was a former Italian colony under British military administration. Its future was a matter for other men to settle. No Eritrean signed at San Francisco. No Eritrean was asked.
Yet Eritreans were not idle that season. Four years earlier, on 5 May 1941, a group of them had founded Mahber Fikri Hager, the Association for the Love of Country. It was the first body to speak for Eritrean society as a whole. Its twelve leaders were six Christians and six Muslims, a balance chosen on purpose. Its vice-president was Abdulkadir Kebire, a man schooled in the Quran and in Arabic and shaped by the anti-colonial currents of Egypt. On 10 June 1946 he told his people where freedom lay. The single door to freedom and independence, he said, was “education alone, education alone”.
I begin with Kebire because he sets the tone of the whole story. The Eritrean claim was never made with a rifle first. It was made with an argument.
II. The Petitioners
Eritreans took that argument to the Charter’s own institutions. They did not stand outside the new order and curse it. They walked into it and pleaded their case.
When the General Assembly established its Commission for Eritrea, Eritreans appeared and spoke. Sheikh Ibrahim Sultan, who carried the Muslim wing of the movement, told the Assembly a plain truth. Eritrea, he said, “has never been part of Imperial Ethiopia”. To join the two was to hand a people to its adversary. Without justice, he warned, there would be no lasting peace in the Horn. Weldeab Weldemariam carried the Christian wing. The two men had sworn their unity years before, in 1944, at Saleh Kekia’s home in Asmara, in a ceremony that joined Muslim and Christian observance on purpose. As late as September 1963 the two of them travelled to the United Nations with barely ten dollars between them for a day, to put their case once more before its members. That is what conviction looks like.
The case was heard. It was not heeded. The reason was given, with a candour I respect, by the United States Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. From the standpoint of justice, he conceded, the wishes of the Eritrean people deserved consideration. But the strategic interest of the United States in the Red Sea made it necessary to tie the territory to Ethiopia. Justice pointed one way. Interest pointed the other. Interest won. At least for a while.
So on 2 December 1950 the General Assembly adopted Resolution 390 A (V). Eritrea would be an autonomous unit federated with Ethiopia under the sovereignty of the Ethiopian Crown. The vote was lawful. The organ was competent. The procedure was correct. I do not call the resolution illegal, because it was not.
But legality is not the same thing as legitimacy. A decision can be perfectly valid and still betray the principle it was meant to serve. The Assembly’s own commission had found that most Eritreans did not want union. The Charter named self-determination among its purposes. The Assembly then reached a result its own findings did not support. That is the gap I want to name. It is not a charge of bad faith. It is a structural fact. A lawful organ, working under the weight of its most powerful members, can produce an outcome its own founding principles would not bless.
III. A Question of Decolonisation, Not Secession
What followed proved the point. The federation lasted barely a decade. The imperial regime curtailed Eritrea’s institutions and silenced its Tigrinya and Arabic press. In November 1962 it dissolved the Eritrean Assembly and swallowed the territory as a mere province. A resolution had created a status. No one stood ready to defend it.
Eritreans then did what petition had failed to do. They fought. For thirty years they sustained a struggle on their own effort, held together by that same unity across faith and region. In April 1993 they voted. A United Nations mission, UNOVER, observed the referendum. An overwhelming majority chose independence, and Eritrea entered the United Nations the following month.
Here I must be exact, because the label matters. Some international lawyers file Eritrea under secession. On this reading Eritrea had become part of Ethiopia and then separated from it in 1993 with Ethiopia’s consent. I understand why the reading exists. Eritrea had been administered as part of Ethiopia for three decades. Ethiopia recognised the new state two days after the vote. On its face this looks like a parent state letting a province go.
I do not accept it. The Eritrean question is a question of decolonisation, not of secession, and the difference is not a quibble. Eritrea was never in law a province of Ethiopia. It was a distinct colonial territory, the Italian Colony of Eritrea, with its own defined boundaries. Its disposal in 1950 was an act of the General Assembly under a peace treaty among the great Powers. It was not the internal arrangement of an ancient Ethiopian nation. The dissolution of the federation in 1962 was an unlawful act. On the old maxim ex injuria jus non oritur, a wrong cannot create a right. An unlawful annexation could not extinguish the underlying entitlement of the Eritrean people. So the years from 1991 to 1993 did not break Eritrea away from a state to which it had lawfully belonged. They completed a decolonisation that had been interrupted for forty years.
Even the scholarship that canvasses the secession reading records what sets Eritrea apart. It was at once a colony and a territory “whose disposition was controlled by a peace treaty among the major powers”. That is not the profile of an ordinary breakaway province. It is the profile of a colony whose freedom was delayed.
Why does the word matter so much? Because to call Eritrea a seceding province is to assume, quietly, that it had once lawfully belonged to Ethiopia. That is the very thing the Eritrean case denies. A label is not a finding. But repeat a label often enough and it hardens into a fact, and the contest beneath it is closed without ever being decided. This is exactly the work the Charter’s principle of self-determination was meant to do. The right belongs to the people. It does not belong to the more powerful party’s preferred description of them.
IV. A World in Transition
The Charter now lives in a changing world. Power is moving from a single centre towards many. A multipolar order is taking shape. I do not think this is a cause for alarm. But it is a cause for vigilance.
Transitions of this kind are turbulent. They are sensitive for every state. Old certainties loosen. New ones have not yet set. In such a season a state without firm principles is easily blown about.
Eritrea is not such a state. Its principles were set at the founding and have not moved: self-reliance, sovereign equality, and the plain priority of legality over force. President Isaias Afwerki has put the first of these in words that need no gloss. The country must “reject hand-outs and rely on our own efforts, toil and resilience”, he has said, and it must keep learning, building and growing on its own terms even in times of hardship. He has added that national independence “cannot be seen in isolation from the prevalence of a just global order”. That aspiration is the Charter’s own.
A state that held its principles through forty years of waiting and thirty years of war will not lose them in a shift of the global balance. Once formidable, always formidable. The transition is not a hurdle Eritrea fears. It is a season Eritrea is built for.
V. The Charter at Eighty-One
But what of the Charter itself? It is eighty-one years old this June, and counting. What is its fate?
I do not believe its principles have aged. Sovereign equality, self-determination, and the restraint of force are as sound now as in 1945. What has aged is the machinery. The United Nations is the agency charged with upholding the Charter, and the agency has much reform to do.
The clearest case is the Security Council. The General Assembly gives sovereign equality a form. Eritrea has one vote among many. The Council does not work that way. Enduring power sits with five permanent members and their veto. More than half a century after the great wave of decolonisation, the African continent still holds no permanent seat. The African states have asked for that to change, in the common position they call the Ezulwini Consensus, and they have asked for two decades. The asking has not stopped, which tells me the grievance is real.
The Organisation is now reforming itself. The Secretary-General’s UN80 initiative proposes deep cuts and the merging of agencies. Saving money is fair enough. But efficiency is not the question the small states have pressed for decades. Their question is representation. A reform that trims the cost of the Organisation does nothing for the standing of its members. Reform that took sovereign equality seriously would reach the chamber where binding decisions are made.
There is encouragement to be found, and I want to name it. A group of states has organised itself for the express purpose of defending the Charter. The Group of Friends in Defense of the Charter of the United Nations was launched in New York on 6 July 2021. Eritrea is a founding member. The group now numbers eighteen states, and it held its first ministerial meeting on the margins of the General Assembly in September 2021. In 2023 it carried its work to Geneva as well. It stands for a multipolar order, for non-interference in the affairs of states, and for what it sums up as the priority of legality over force. That last idea could stand as a summary of this whole essay. These friends, and the conferences and declarations they produce, deserve more support, not less. A Charter under strain needs states willing to say so aloud.
VI. The Petitioner Takes Her Seat
There is a fitting symmetry in where Eritrea now stands. The state whose petition was set aside in 1950 is no longer at the door. It is taking its seat inside.
In June 2026 Eritrea was elected a Vice-President of the General Assembly for its eighty-first session, which opens in September. In the same month it was elected to the Economic and Social Council for a three-year term running from 2027. The petitioner of 1950 will sit in the leadership of the chamber that once heard her and looked away. That is no small thing. It is sovereign equality made visible.
I do not pretend the work is finished. The asymmetries of the Council remain. The financing of development is thin, and a small state still feels the cold of measures decided in rooms it cannot enter. But the direction is the right one. Eritrea travels it from a position of capacity rather than dependence, which is the only position from which a small state is ever truly heard.
VII. The Hope We Cling To
Let me end where the Charter’s own friends end. They call the Charter “a true act of faith” in the best of humanity. I think that is exactly right. For all its unfinished machinery, the Charter remains the thing humanity clings to when the weather turns. In a turbulent and shifting world it is still our common text. It is still our shared promise. It is still our best name for the world we want our children to inherit.
Sheikh Ibrahim Sultan told the General Assembly in 1950 that without justice there would be no lasting peace in the Horn. He was a petitioner whose argument was acknowledged and then set aside. The truest way to mark the Charter’s ninth decade would be to build an Organisation in which the arguments of small states are not merely heard but can shape the decisions that bind them. Then the promises made at San Francisco would be, in the Charter’s second century, as real in practice as they have always been in hope.
A note to the reader. What you have read is the short version. I have developed the same argument far more fully in a comprehensive article, now being prepared for publication, on closely related questions. That study works through the disposition of 1950, the distinction between legality and legitimacy, the decolonisation of Eritrea, and the case for Charter reform across the full historical record and the relevant scholarship. If the argument here has held your interest, the longer article is where I make it in full.