At the request of the United Kingdom (UK), the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) held a meeting on the FSO Safer oil tanker issue last week. International organisations like the UN have warned that the rusting tanker, which has been moored off the coast of Yemen since 2015, is at imminent risk of spilling about 1.1 million barrels of oil and causing an environmental and humanitarian catastrophe.
While the UNSC meeting did not result in any significant outcome to tackle the impending crisis, a senior UN official highlighted that the planned expedition to the tanker was “running out” of cash, as the mission to conduct an assessment on the tanker’s condition had been postponed several times. In fact, efforts aimed at resolving the tanker crisis have been met with multiple obstacles and delays, including the refusal of Yemen’s Houthi rebels to grant UN inspectors safe passage to the ship. The Houthis, who control the area where the Safer tanker is moored, have cited differences with international negotiators as a reason why “matters have reached a dead end.”
Given this situation, it is not surprising that there have been calls for the UNSC to authorise military-backed action to ensure the smooth clean-up of the tanker. However, before the Council can approve a military solution, it must first establish that a situation exists wherein the use of force is deemed to be a necessity. Here, the UN Charter can serve as a guide on whether the Council is empowered to take such an action, in particular articles 39, 41, and 42 under chapter VII of the Charter.
Article 39 says that it is the duty of the UNSC to “determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression” and take measures “in accordance with Articles 41 and 42, to maintain or restore international peace and security.” According to Article 41, the Council may decide to use “measures not involving the use of armed force” to resolve a threat to peace and security. Finally, Article 42 mandates the Council to use force to “maintain or restore international peace and security” if measures taken under the previous Article “prove to be ineffective.”
Therefore, the UNSC can authorise military action only if it can prove that an oil spill from FSO Safer constitutes a threat to peace and that non-military measures have been exhausted.
The abandoned tanker has aptly been labelled a “ticking time bomb,” as a potential leak from the abandoned vessel would be four times that of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill near the Alaskan coast, which is widely considered the worst oil spill in terms of damage to the environment. It would result in the widespread destruction of the Red Sea ecology; this includes the rare Red Sea corals which are known for their resistance to rising temperatures.
Furthermore, a spill would impact the livelihoods of around 1.6 million people in the region by damaging coastal industries, ports, fisheries, and marine resources. A Riskaware impact assessment of a spill from Safer for April-June 2021 estimates that “50% of fisheries would likely be blocked from fishing by the oil spill.” It goes on to say that the “livelihoods of 31,500 fishermen would be at risk, and 235,000 workers in the fishing and related industries could lose their jobs.”
The report also posits that in the worst-case scenario of a fire breaking out on the tanker, the impact would be far greater, predicting that around 6.9 million people in Yemen and Saudi Arabia “could be exposed to very high air pollution levels” and that around 967,000 Internally Displaced Persons living in Yemen “could be covered by a smoke plume.”
Additionally, the impact of an oil spill could spill over into Yemen’s ongoing brutal civil war, which the UN has called the “world’s worst humanitarian crisis.” Such an event would halt all operations in Yemen’s Hodeidah port, which receives three-quarters of Yemen’s total food imports, for at least two to three months. This would also result in a major shortfall of fuel, which would impact electricity and health services.
Therefore, it could be reasonably argued an oil spill from the FSO Safer could threaten the peace and security of the region and could have disastrous consequences for economic, health, and environmental security in the region. In fact, Yemeni ambassador to the UN Abdullah Ali Fadhel Al Saadi says that if the UN does not take “deterrent measures” against the Houthis to ensure the clean-up of the tanker as soon as possible, the world would wake up to “one of the biggest environmental and humanitarian disasters ever.”
While the tanker crisis has been established as a threat to peace, Article 41 of the UN Charter requires the UNSC to take non-military measures before mandating the use of force. To this end, since 2015, the UN has made several attempts to board the tanker and conduct a clean-up operation. However, the Houthis have been reluctant to agree to such an effort because if the UN unloads the oil contained in the tanker, the militants would not be able to extract the oil for its own uses. In fact, the Houthis have reached several agreements with the UN, saying that they would allow an inspection of Safer on the condition that they are allowed to extract the oil, only to later renege on all these deals.
Therefore, given that the UN has made numerous but unsuccessful non-military attempts to resolve the tanker crisis, there are arguably sufficient conditions for the Security Council to approve the use of force under Article 42 of the Charter to bring the tanker crisis to an end. In fact, Ian Ralby, a maritime security expert, argues that “the time has come for the United Nations (UN) Security Council to pass a resolution authorizing military action” to prevent a catastrophe from taking place. “There will be no excuse for failing to prevent the spill of the FSO Safer and the connected pipeline. Ample warnings have made clear the price of inaction,” Ralby says in an Atlantic Council article.
Such measures would be unprecedented. While the Organisation has previously invoked Article 42 to authorise the use of force, most notably in 1990 against the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, it has never approved the use of military force to resolve an environmental threat. Nevertheless, although the tanker issue has a clear environmental dimension, it also has the potential to wreak a severe humanitarian cost on the people of the region, especially in Yemen. It is in this humanitarian context that the Council could invoke the use of Article 42 of the UN Charter to authorise a military-backed expedition to clean up FSO Safer.
However, even if the UNSC opts for a military solution to the crisis, there is no guarantee that things would move smoothly. In fact, the use of force comes with its own risks. Military action could enrage the Houthis and result in the perpetuation of the Yemeni civil war, as the rebels would then be unwilling to negotiate with international actors to end the conflict. In this respect, the option of diplomacy would seem to be a safer bet, and with intense negotiations, the UN could make concessions for the Houthis in return for allowing UN inspectors to visit the ship.
That being said, diplomacy is a time-consuming affair. With the high-risk nature of the issue and the dire warnings issued by international bodies, the UN has to act fast and this includes choosing the option that could potentially end the crisis immediately—the use of force. In fact, the Beirut blast of 2020 should be enough to serve as an adequate caution to the UN that if warnings are not heeded, the consequences could be devastating.