What is R2P - - without you and me?

Outgoing UN Under-Secretary General Kofi Annan is using centre stage for one thing.......the 'Responsibility to Protect'.

On Human Rights Day, Annan was unrelenting in his critique of the continued international failures:

As you know, last year's World Summit formally endorsed that momentous doctrine (R2P) - which means, in essence, that respect for national sovereignty can no longer be used as an excuse for inaction in the face of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. Yet one year later, to judge by what is happening in Darfur, our performance has not improved much since the disasters of Bosnia and Rwanda. Sixty years after the liberation of the Nazi death camps, and 30 years after the Cambodian killing fields, the promise of "never again" is ringing hollow.

All well and good and something we've heard all too often. However, what stood out in last week's speech was his direct call out to civil society:

...I look to civil society - which means you! We need dedicated individuals and dynamic human rights defenders to hold governments to account. States' performance must be judged against their commitments, and they must be accountable both to their own people and to their peers in the international community.

Words alone will never lead action. The only true leadership comes from example. If R2P is not important to us, in a very public way, then on paper it will remain.

Now, before I go . . .

As of Sunday, I’ll be out of town for a week, with very limited access to the internet, so consider this a week’s worth of entries.

Last week at a ‘Responsibility to Protect’ conference in Chicago, Gareth Evans, President of International Crisis Group and Co-Chair of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, delivered the keynote address, The Responsibility to Protect: From an Idea to an International Norm.

And, if anyone knows R2P, it’s Gareth Evans. He doesn’t just understand it, he belives in it’s moral implications and the idea that in the end, it all points back at us, all of us:

And the third piece of unfinished business, the biggest of all as always, is the ever-recurring problem of generating the political will to act. We just have to get to the point where, when the next conscience-shocking mass human rights violation comes along, as it inexorably will, the reflex response of both governments and publics around the world, will be to talk immediately about the responsibility to protect, and find reasons to act, not to pretend that it is none of our business.

That is exactly it. We can point fingers all we like at politicians and policy makers, but if we believe in R2P and we really did mobilize around Darfur and Uganda with that demand, it would be invoked. In fact, I don’t see any other way it ever will be, unless civil society stands up and demands action.

And I can't end it any better than this:

When we say that R2P is the responsibility of the international community, that means all of us.

The “big problem in Darfur” and the “prospects for success” in Uganda

The conflict in Darfur remains, at least in the media, the ideal case for humanitarian intervention and the ‘responsibility to protect’. Not so fast, continues Ramesh Thakur.

Before undertaking military intervention, be confident of reasonable prospects for success in the mission. Given Sudan's size and regional geopolitics, this is a big problem in Darfur. By its very nature, including unpredictability, unintended consequences and the risk to innocent civilians caught in the crossfire, warfare is inherently brutal: nothing humanitarian about the means.

The ethic of conviction, which impels us to act, must be balanced by the equally compelling ethic of responsibility, which requires us to weigh moral action against the pragmatism of consequences.

Still, the fundamental question cannot be avoided. Under what circumstances is the use of force necessary to provide effective international humanitarian protection to at-risk populations without the consent of their own government?

There enters the question of the 20-year conflict in northern Uganda. A brutal war that has seen over 30,000 children abducted, 100,000 civilians killed and over 1.5-million people (90% of the entire population of northern Uganda) forced into squalid displacement camps. Conditions are so bad, that 1,000 people have been dying every week.

In northern Uganda, a ceasefire is now in place and peace talks are in motion, yet the camp conditions remain unchanged. The government of Uganda has guaranteed that the camps will be destroyed by the end of the year, so that the entire civilian population can go home.

Then the questions abound. Home to what? And if the peace talks fail? How much longer do we wait to protect the innocent victims of this senseless and ultimately simple conflict? 1 year? 2 years? 5 years?

If the government of Uganda can’t provide enough support to the camps or can’t allow ‘their’ people to go home, what is the responsibility to protect?

The responsibility is clear, and that clarity is in the very first pillar of R2P, the responsibility to 'prevent', “...to address...man-made crisis putting populations at risk.”

The need is clear, so where is the call for R2P in Uganda?

The morality and practicality of R2P

Sure we're giving Eric Posner's thoughts on R2P way more attention than they deserve, but they were picked apart, with balance and depth on Monday by Ramesh Thakur, one of the principal authors of the report 'The Responsibility to Protect'.

The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty was the midwife to "the responsibility to protect" precisely because we recognized "humanitarian intervention" to be an oxymoron. It is not obvious that Posner read our slim report before proceeding to criticize its main conclusions.

In using Iraq to attack the new norm, Posner sets up a straw target. Most ICISS Commissioners argued that Iraq did not meet our threshold criteria; some of us said so publicly in 2003.

End of story.

What's most compelling in Thakur's article is his admission that R2P is far from perfect, but explains that what it does provide is a clear moral accountability for 'intervention'.

The goal of protective intervention is never to wage war on a state to destroy it and eliminate its statehood, but always to protect victims of atrocities inside the state, embed the protection in reconstituted institutions after the intervention, and then withdraw all foreign troops.

Military intervention, even for humanitarian purposes, is a polite euphemism for the use of deadly force on a massive scale. Even when there is agreement that intervention may be necessary to protect innocent people from life-threatening danger by interposing an outside force between actual or apprehended victims and perpetrators, key questions remain about agency, lawfulness and legitimacy.

Based on the pragmatism of consequences as much as legal doctrine, ICISS concluded that there is no substitute for the U.N. as the authorizing agent.

R2P below the 49th parallel

Something is stirring south of border. The Chicago Council on Global Affairs is hosting a conference this week with international leaders on R2P, The Responsibility to Protect: Engaging America.

Over the course of the conference, a three-part strategy will be developed to increase America’s commitment to protect populations from mass atrocities. Experts and policy makers will focus on what responsibility to protect means, why it matters and why the U.S. should embrace it; policies for implementation; as well as how to bring the responsibility to protect to the center of national debate.

The ‘windy city’ was also the first city council to pass a resolution that endorses the ‘responsibility to protect’, and Chicago is just getting started.

So, what about consent?

In Friday’s Sudan Tribune, Jean-François Thibault makes his point very clear in ‘Darfur - Failure of responsibility to protect principle’.

His point is this: The tragedy in Darfur is without question; however, the idea that the UN needs Sudan’s consent to intervene is a different issue entirely. And, it’s an issue that's getting shut out of the discussion.

UN Security Council Resolution 1706, which called for UN troops and allows for the use of force, was passed on 31 August. The Resolution “invited” the consent of the Government of Sudan. But it can be argued, as the International Crisis Group did in its recent report “Getting the UN into Darfur”, that it does not formally require that consent.

But, with the May Darfur Peace Agreement all but dead, is it not the right moment for the UN Security Council to move beyond the post-Rwandan rhetoric of “never again” and to start making good on its very responsibility to protect Darfuree civilians by pushing for much more robust measures?

Otherwise, it might become very tempting to say that the Responsibility to Protect was indeed an empty shell, and to admit that we simply do not care about what is now happening in Darfur.

Discuss.

Nordic R2P call gets it right

On Wednesday, five humanitarian groups based in Norway, Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Sweden pooled their resources and have agreed to work together with a ‘Joint Nordic call for protection’, to lobby their governments to fulfill their “responsibility to protect”.

Not only is this vital advocacy, their focus and messaging is near perfect:

All five organisations have committed themselves to presenting a series of demands to their respective governments, covering fields related to all the three aspects of the Responsibility to Protect, such as that they:

- Strongly condemn and never tolerate the deliberate targeting of civilians or any acts of violence and abuses committed against civilians in situations of armed conflict

- Foster prevention as the only reliable means of protection and strengthen their own capabilities in preventive strategies

- Ensure that if prevention fails, the international community will respond collectively to stop genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and to protect vulnerable populations.

Time for us here in Canada and the US to get our act together.