IJ, regular reader and leaver of fine comments, noted on my last post that:
The need for intervention in a sovereign country will continue to be arguable, until the UN is prepared to adjudicate one way or the other. Lately, there’s been a lot of sitting on the fence ““ especially with Sudan’s Darfur, where the US claims genocide is taking place. The chances of R2P being implemented are currently about zero.
Actually, back in September 2005 at a UN summit, every member (including the Sudan!) signed an agreement on the so-called “responsibility to protect” allowing foreign powers to intervene in a country if the national authorities fail to protect their population from things such as genocide.
(1) Basic Principles
State sovereignty implies responsibility, and the primary responsibility for the protection of its people lies with the state itself.
Where a population is suffering serious harm, as a result of internal war, insurgency, repression or state failure, and the state in question is unwilling or unable to halt or avert it, the principle of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect.
Thus:
The Responsibility to Protect means that no state can hide behind the concept of sovereignty while it conducts”“or permits”“ widespread harm to its population. Nor can states turn a blind eye when these events extend beyond their borders, nor because action does not suit their narrowly-defined national interests.
Perhaps still somewhat idealistic, but a good start. The key problem here is again lack of enforcement. Putting UN troops together, for about anything, is usually a complicated and painstaking task and by the time its finished, the killing is usually completed leaving the only viable options NATO or the US and a coalition of the willing. For readers such as Elizabeth, what exactly is your problem, if any, about US intervention across the globe? Too much self-interest? Failure to go through the years of paperwork and wait for more death first? Timing such as Iraq perhaps being too soon after Afghanistan? Not enough follow through?
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Comments to this entry
Eddie
April 3, 2006
11:46 pm
This isn't so much a complaint about China's amoral foreign policy objectives (driven by its energy needs) as it is a note of disgust about the inability of Western governments, particulary the US, to take any meaningful action or even think about the impact of their "talk, but don't act" leadership style in regards to these types of man-made tragedies.
mark safranski
April 4, 2006
1:49 am
Of course, IL is mostly a crock and in practice states get away with anything that no other state or group of states use power to prevent, but when IL can be invoked to stop mass atrocities I'll say a kind word or two for it
IJ
April 4, 2006
9:41 am
"if humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica - to gross and systematic violations of human rights that affect every precept of our common humanity?"
Canada's intensive efforts resulted in the report "responsibility to protect":http://www.iciss.ca/report2-en.asp. The study succeeded in persuading the United Nations in September 2005 to move in the direction of its thinking. A couple of months later, "the Inter-Parliamentary Union at the UN":http://www.ipu.org/splz-e/unga05/summery.pdf (IPU) concluded:
"If the United Nations was to deal with global threats and problems in an effective manner, it would need the support not only of the delegations currently present at Headquarters, but also of world public opinion and of national parliaments. . . The greatest challenge to the new doctrine [R2P] might be in finding the political will to make use of it, and that was where parliamentarians had a role to play, in advocating for the doctrine in order to bring about a much more energetic response to gross abuses than had been the case in the past. It was in parliaments worldwide that the impunity of the powerful oppressors could be broken. If parliamentarians persuaded their governments to act pursuant to the new doctrine, then hopefully at some point in the future its very existence alone would be a sufficient deterrent."
Canada have done their bit. Over to the IPU.
Taking Aim » Blog Archive » Rewriting the international rulebook
April 4, 2006
6:37 pm
IJ
April 5, 2006
9:38 am
Persuasion? Budgets for defence spending would change, for starters, as forces are transformed. In fact, on budgets, the UK's Ministry of Defence is already arguing with the executive that the MoD should not be forced to pay for a replacement nuclear weapon system that is "not for war-fighting". "Source":http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2006-03-06b.50184.h#c4464
Elizabeth
April 24, 2006
1:17 pm
If both the states of Afghanistan and Iraq had attacked the US one after another, one might understand the sequence of events following September 11th. But this is not what happened. If the US were to attack the regimes committing the worst atrocities against their peoples, one after another, one could understand the humanitarian justification. But this is not what is happening.
The US is attacking states to gain control of resources (land, oil, gas, people) that it needs for its own good (and by "its own", I mean, of its rich landowners). Fine. That's life. But let's not call it intervention for humanitarian purposes.
Chirol
April 24, 2006
1:38 pm
Elizabeth
April 25, 2006
4:53 am
In terms of Iraq, the humanitarian justification only came when the ground dropped out from under the self-defense (I despise this "imminent threat" business) justification. Moreover, it was done poorly (the Kurds suffered years ago... some people are still being tortured (like thousands in China but never mind China)... uh, Saddam has something in common with Hitler). Worse, it was pointless, because by that time it was too late to get the EU or Arab states on board (forget Iran). It was a lie manufactured purely for domestic political purposes (a lie that only the Americans would buy, frankly).
Bosnia and Kosovo were, I think, less than successes practically (we can thank the UN for this failure as much as the US), but in terms of justification, much better done. I should note here that at the time, I had a few Bosnian refugee friends and was very pro-intervention. We'd had a lot of people on our campus arguing for that.
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October 12, 2006
10:36 pm
Taking Aim
February 12, 2007
10:02 pm
British Defence Secretary John Reid calls for international law to be completely re-written to facilitate fighting global terrorism. He wants the Geneva Convention to be re-thought, too:
“We risk trying to fight 21st-century conflict with 20th-c...