There is something rhetorically appealing about the claim that both sides in a conflict have violated international law. It signals neutrality. It sounds principled. It appears to place the speaker above the fray of geopolitical partisanship.
The difficulty is that legal analysis does not operate through moral symmetry – and the argument advanced by Zane Dangor, Director-General of South Africa’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation, in his interview with Daily Maverick, is more sophisticated than its critics have acknowledged. Which makes what it leaves unresolved all the more troubling.
Let’s begin with what Dangor gets right.
His account of Article 2(4) and Article 51 is sequentially correct. He walks through the charter’s prohibition on force, identifies the Security Council as the only body that can authorise it, and then acknowledges the self-defence carve-out: if an armed attack occurs, the attacked state may respond without prior council approval, provided that response is proportionate and directed at those responsible.
He even concedes that if Iran had direct evidence that a US base in Qatar was used to launch the strikes, targeting that base would be legally defensible under Article 51. That is not a symmetrical reading of the charter. That is the charter’s own sequential logic, applied carefully.
The problem is that Dangor applies that evidentiary rigour selectively. He concludes that Iran’s strikes on Gulf states are disproportionate because, as he puts it, there is no “direct proof” linking those bases to the original attacks. That may be correct. But he does not tell us what standard of proof he is applying, where in the law that standard is found, or why the same evidentiary demand does not apply with equal force to the initial US-Israeli strikes.
This is not a trivial inconsistency. It is the load-bearing structure of the entire legal argument.
Threshold
If “direct proof” is the threshold before a state may treat a foreign military installation as a legitimate target, then the US and Israel faced precisely that threshold before launching strikes on Iranian territory. The question of whether they met it – whether the evidence of an Iranian nuclear threat was sufficient to satisfy necessity under Article 51 – is the central legal question of this conflict. Dangor does not ask it. He treats the initiating strikes as a given, and subjects only the response to scrutiny.
This is where the Congo case citation becomes important – and where Dangor’s argument, despite citing it correctly, cuts against his own position. The International Court of Justice in Congo vs Uganda ruled that Uganda’s military intervention was unlawful because the preconditions for self-defense did not exist. There was no actual armed attack that triggered Article 51. Dangor invokes this case to dispatch anticipatory self-defence, which is fair. The case law is clear that Article 51 requires an armed attack, not a feared one.
But then the sequence demands a further question. If anticipatory self-defence is excluded, and Iran had not yet attacked either the US or Israel at the time the strikes were launched, then the initiating use of force was not self-defence at all. It was something else – call it preventive war, call it coercion – but it cannot wear the Article 51 label. And if it cannot wear that label, then Iran’s right of self-defence was triggered by the strikes themselves, which is precisely what Article 51 says: the right arises when an armed attack occurs.
Dangor acknowledges this architecture in the abstract. He does not follow it to its conclusion.
Oman negotiations
There is a third thread the interview introduces and then abandons: the Oman negotiations. Dangor notes that the day before the strikes, Iran had agreed in Omani-facilitated talks not to enrich uranium for military purposes – going further, he says, than the original Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action commitments.
If accurate, this is not diplomatic background noise. It is legally material. Necessity under Article 51 requires not merely that a threat exist, but that force was the only available means of addressing it. If a negotiated resolution was within reach on the eve of the attack, the necessity condition fails. The use of force was not necessary. It was chosen.
This is not a point Dangor makes. It deserves to be made.
What emerges, then, is a picture more complicated than either “both sides are equally guilty” or “Dangor misreads the charter”. The department’s position is legally literate. Its account of the charter’s structure is sound. Its critique of anticipatory self-defence is correct and well supported by the case law it invokes. Where it falls short is not in its logic, but in its consistency – applying a demanding evidentiary standard to Iran’s response while leaving the initiating strikes largely unexamined.
The architecture of the UN Charter is sequential, not symmetrical: Article 2(4) prohibits the use of force; Article 51 recognises the right to respond once that prohibition has already been breached. To apply that sequence rigorously to one side of a conflict while treating the other’s actions as the starting point is not neutrality. It is analysis that stops precisely where it becomes most inconvenient.
If SA is serious about speaking in the language of law rather than politics – and Dangor’s interview suggests it is – then the next question must follow: Did the initiating strikes satisfy necessity and proportionality, given that diplomacy was active, that no armed attack had yet occurred, and that the legal record does not permit hypothetical danger to substitute for actual threat?
The charter does not stop asking questions simply because the answers are uncomfortable for powerful states and their allies.
Neither should we. DM
Ali Ridha Khan read for an MA in political studies at the University of the Western Cape, where he held Andrew W Mellon Foundation fellowships at the Centre for Humanities Research. A Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, he writes on political theory, Black Consciousness, aesthetics and the emotional life of politics in post-apartheid South Africa.