We should be able to act outside the UN

The ODT reports:

Prime Minister John Key says major companies such as Fonterra have been asked not to exploit the gap left by other countries’ trade sanctions on Russia because to do so would be a “terrible look” for New Zealand.

This raises the question why we haven’t imposed trade sanctions ourselves. It seems the answer is that we haven’t changed the law from from Labour had it, which was we can only impose sanctions if the UN agrees to them.

The problem is that Russia of course has a veto at the UN, so this means we allow our foreign policy to be subservient to their veto at the UN.

In most cases we would want to only do sanctions when the UN agrees to them. But as an independent country we should have the ability to impose them, even when there is no UN vote.