The United Nations and the Responsibility to Protect
After the end of the Cold War, the status of the United Nations grew considerably, and the organization started focusing on achieving its greater objectives: maintaining international peace and security, securing justice and human rights, and promoting social progress. This led to a renewed interest in humanitarian issues and in helping populations in need. However, the problem of how to respond appropriately to gross and systematic violations of human right that happen within the territory of a sovereign country has been subject to much international debate. On one side, there is the appeal to our shared humanity and the urgency to help those who are suffering no matter where in the world. On the other side, there is the international principle of non-interference in domestic affairs of sovereign countries. Arguing that human rights are a greater principle than sovereignty, the United Nations has promoted many humanitarian interventions that use force as a means to achieve its goals, understanding that consent is not necessarily needed, especially when the government of a country is the one attacking its own population and causing the humanitarian crisis.
In 1992, in Somalia, UN forces suffered heavy human losses and found enormous resistance in the provision of humanitarian aid. Fearing a recurrence of this, the international community took three months to act in Rwanda, in 1994. In the meantime, one million Tutsis were brutally exterminated. The failure in one African country sealed the fate of another, resulting in the first case of genocide since the Holocaust. It became evident that a new consensus on responses to massive human rights violations was needed to help the international community to respond more efficiently and avoid new genocides.
As a response, the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine was established in 2000, setting out clear criteria for the practice of humanitarian interventions. It argued that, to have their right of sovereignty respected, states must be able to provide security to their people. When they fail to do so, the international community is not only legally authorised to intervene in their internal affairs, but it also has the responsibility to do so in order to prevent and protect people from violence. This new concept delegitimized the discourse of leaders who appeal to the principle of sovereignty to protect themselves from any external interference while committing crimes against their own population.
The R2P doctrine proposes a three-pillar approach of responsibilities: Every state has the Responsibility to Protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing; The wider international community has the responsibility to encourage and assist individual states in meeting that responsibility; If a state is manifestly failing to protect its populations, the international community must take appropriate collective action, in a timely and decisive manner and in accordance with the UN Charter.
Howerever, the R2P doctrine is as acclaimed as it is criticised. One of the main criticisms is that states can invoke R2P to justify any military intervention, or that when there is indeed a situation requiring humanitarian intervention, states might be unwilling to put the lives of their soldiers at risk on purely humanitarian grounds, unless there is scope for material or political gain. In 2011, the R2P-based intervention in Libya was accused of being a pretext to carry out regime-change. This has yielded global concerns that the R2P principles were used as a political excuse to intervene in the country’s affairs. As a result, Russia and China have later vetoed several attempts of humanitarian intervention in Syria.
It is also very hard to assess the efficiency of an intervention because there will not be any evidence to show how things would have unfolded without the intervention. And while the benefits of the intervention might not be visible, the costs always are. Still, the legitimacy of the R2P doctrine is important because, while there is no supreme global authority with the power to prosecute and punish violators of the international legal order, states tend to respect the norms and try to plausibly justify their actions to other countries. This alone makes a valid case in favor of the criteria that were established by the R2P and adopted by the UN.
But, ultimately, the main weakness of the R2P doctrine is that it is not legally binding, which makes it more of an aspiration rather than a real international norm. The United Nations relies completely on its member states to provide military force for any intervention that wishes to undertake, and has therefore to deal with the fact that, in most cases, they will put their national political interests above human rights urgencies, resulting in arbitrary decisions whenever a crisis requires the application of the R2P principles.
All these difficulties show that the R2P doctrine is far from being the solution to the problems the UN faces when trying to tackle gross human rights violations. Urgent reforms are needed in the areas of international peacekeeping, Security Council and General Assembly Reforms.
