Please note that this piece was published on the UK Constitutional Law Association’s blog on 28 November 2015, and is available here. It has been re-published here with the permission of the author.
By Veronika Fikfak
Next week Members of Parliament will debate and vote on whether to support the Government’s proposal to extend military action against Islamic State (IS) to Syria. On Thursday, the Prime Minister made his case to the House, relying on the new Security Council Resolution to insist that the intervention would be legal. In this post, I analyse the limits of this argument, showing that the Resolution adopted by the Security Council does not unequivocally make the use of force legal. More importantly, however, I make the case that next week MPs should not limit their questions and therefore scrutiny of the Government’s proposals to international (legal) questions but rather turn their attention inwards – to domestic interest, concerns and implications of any future action.