Operationalizing Our Ideals

For the Responsibility to Protect to become a reality, it needs more than a ratification in the UN General Assembly.

(Co-authored by Robert W. Murray, doctoral student at the University of Alberta)

The point when an idea becomes a tangible reality has been a long debated topic. Perhaps nowhere is this inquiry more vital than in the debate over the responsibility to protect, (i.e. the emerging international norm that could hold governments accountable to the so-called “international community” if they fail to protect their citizens from the most egregious wrongs).

In 2001, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) issued a report that called for the development of a new normative framework to guide the international community to take certain actions if nations proved unable or unwilling to protect their populations from genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.

This doctrine, called the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), presents new ways of considering issues like the sanctity of state sovereignty and argues that the international community has a moral and ethical responsibility to intervene in areas where the most horrible human atrocities are being committed or planned.

Armed interventionism is only one aspect of R2P. The ICISS report also envisioned “the responsibility to prevent” conflicts from breaking out in the first place in an effort to reduce or eliminate the need for physical intervention, as well as “the responsibility to rebuild” should physical force be needed to stem the grave atrocities. Thus, military intervention was only considered as a last resort by the ICISS, in those cases where prevention and other “diplomatic” measures fail.

In 2005, at a follow-up meeting to the 2000 Millennium Summit, leaders from 191 UN member states passed a version of the R2P and, for all intents and purposes, accepted it as an “official” doctrine.

Some observers like Tom Weiss and Alex Bellamy have called this version “R2P lite” – a watered down iteration of what the ICISS had in mind. The 2005 version is considered to be a more lenient, though more pragmatic, adaptation of the original conception.

Yet, R2P in either its 2001 or 2005 incarnations, has not been implemented by the UN. Why?

To answer this question, one needs to return to that most fundamental question facing R2P advocates – when can it be said that the normative “idea” of R2P has become a “reality” in international politics?

Some scholars have argued that R2P has already grown to the point of being a universally accepted norm. Ramesh Thakur, one of the pioneers of the R2P concept and a member of the ICISS, promotes such a claim. In a series of recent editorial articles, including one published in The Mark, Thakur contends that the norm of intervention is a moral imperative for states, that the resources are firmly in place for military interventions, and that international law has come to recognize the right of international society to intervene on behalf of unprotected populations.

To support his contention, Thakur examines the events of this past summer in the UN General Assembly. Certain countries seemed to be experiencing what can only be called “buyer’s remorse” and were agitating for a change in the UN’s position on R2P. But after General Assembly President Miguel D'Escoto Brockmann, taking advantage of the absence of Secretary General Ban Ki-moon this past July, called for a sudden review of R2P, many observers were surprised to find that most countries chose to reaffirm their support for the idea. R2P proponents, like Thakur, interpreted this as a clear sign that the idea had finally become a universally accepted reality.

While the General Assembly’s vote can indeed be seen as very positive for the evolution of R2P, there are still far too many obstacles in the path of this norm before it can be proclaimed “universal.” Put another way: this international norm is still no international law.

The international society of states still relies heavily on the Westphalian notion that state sovereignty includes the legal right of non-intervention in the internal affairs of states. This is most clearly evidenced by the lack of action by the “international community” in areas like the Darfur region of Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Burma, among others. For R2P to become international law, it would require many more years of not just debate in the UN Security Council and General Assembly, but also testing in actual cases.

The best chance of operationalizing R2P would be to focus on utilizing the preventive measures implied in the doctrine. To accomplish this, there would have to be major advances in the UN’s ability to gather, process, and present credible intelligence in areas of human insecurity. Whenever this idea has been brought forward at the UN, it has run into significant obstacles from some of the permanent members of the UN Security Council.

There is currently no blueprint for how the UN logistically would intervene into areas where human atrocities are being committed. Furthermore, the political will to undertake such intervention is sadly lacking, as is the will to provide the UN with the kind of financial and military resources needed to carry out such undertakings.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, R2P is contingent upon an understanding of human solidarity that affirms that people of the world recognize certain moral obligations towards citizens of every nation. In an era when humanitarian disasters are seemingly ubiquitous, humanity has still not yet reached that level of empathy and solidarity.

Before an idea can be accepted as universally-adopted practice, it must be used, tested, and proven successful. In the case of R2P, there has still been no real UN-initiated R2P mission (although one could make the case that the initiative by Kofi Annan in Kenya after the outbreak of violence last year might classify as an R2P initiative). If states are as willing to affirm the idea of R2P as they appeared to do last July, why are they so reluctant actually to operationalize it? There is no simple answer to this question.

What cannot go unnoticed, however, is the clear need for a doctrine like R2P. Our international society must continue to take the necessary incremental, not revolutionary, precedential steps to realize the goal of moving R2P from idea to reality, from international norm to international law.