Applying the Responsibility to Protect Principle (R2P) to Darfur
By Ronald J. Glossop
I. Origin and History of the R2P principle
A. The "Responsibility to Protect" concept first appeared in the report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereigny published in December 2001 by the Inter-national Development Research Centre in Ottawa, Canada, ISBN 0-88936-960-7. It is available in the internet at <http://www.idrc.ca>.
1. This commission was initiated by Lloyd Axworthy, former Foreign Affairs Minister of Canada, in response to concerns about the NATO intervention in Kosovo (1999) without U.N. Security Council authorization on the one hand and the lack of international action to prevent the genocide in Rwanda (1994) on the other.
2. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan had called for the international community to "forge unity" on the issue of how to deal with gross violations of human rights when international inter-vention would seem to violate the principle of national sovereignty.
3. The commission was appointed by the government of Canada and a group of major foundations, & its composition was announced to the U.N. General Assembly in Sep 2000.
4. Co-Chairs were Gareth Evans of Australia and Mohamed Sahnoun of Algeria. The other members were Giséle Coté-Harper of Canada, Lee Hamilton of the United States, Michael Ignatieff of Canada, Vladimir Lukin of Russia, Klaus Naumann of Germany, Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa, Fidel Ramos of the Philippines, Cornelio Sommaruga of Switzerland, Eduardo Stein Barillas of Guatemala, and Ramesh Thakur of India.
5. Issues to be addressed by the Commission were: Does the international community ever have the right to intervene within the borders of a sovereign nation-state? If so, under what conditions? What theoretical base could possibly justify such outside intervention?
6. The Commission's answer calls attention to the obligation of governments to preserve the "personal security" of their citizens as well as their "national security" against other countries.
7. It is argued that the notion of "state sovereignty implies a dual responsibility." Each state has the responsibility not only "to respect the sovereignty of other states" but also "to respect the dignity and basic rights of people within the state."
8. The Commission report says, "We prefer to talk not of a 'right to intervene' but of a 'responsibility to protect.'" (p. 11) The key point is to shift focus from "sovereignty as control" to "sovereignty as responsibility." (p. 13)
9. The Commission deliberately refrained from using the term "humanitarian intervention" in deference to humanitarian groups who object to using that expression in any situation where military action is being employed. (p. 9)
10. Sovereignty as responsibility means that leaders of governments: (1) must protect their citizens & promote their welfare, (2) are responsible to both their citizens & the international community through the U.N., & (3) can be held liable for their acts of commission & omission.
11. Not only do international criminal tribunals have a right to exert jurisdiction, but for crimes like genocide where treaties provide for universal jurisdiction even other national governments can act to enforce the law.
12. But the Commission cautions that "It is only when national systems of justice either cannot or will not act to judge crimes against humanity that universal jurisdiction and other international options should come into play." The national governments have first responsibilty.
13. Furthermore, the responsibility to protect includes (both for national governments and for the international community) not only the responsibility to react to human catastrophes but also to prevent them and to rebuild the community afterwards. (p. 17)
14. Much of the Commission's 85-page report deals with very detailed commentary about specific situations such as the responsibility to protect individual citizens, the responsibility to prevent catastrophes, the responsibility to react to catastrophes, the responsibility to rebuild the community after interventions, the various roles of the U.N. in interventions, the issue of how military interventions are to be carried out, and what needs to be done in the future -- all with many references to specific past incidents, e.g. Kosovo, Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, Iraq, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Cambodia, and East Timor.
15. In conclusion this report by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereigny proposes a re-interpretation of the notion of "national sovereignty" so that it includes the responsibility of a state to protect the security of its own citizens. If it fails to do that, then the international community and other states have an obligation to do it.
B. The R2P principle gets official support from the United Nations.
1. In December 2004 (3 years later) UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges, & Change fully embraced & called for implementation of the R2P principle.
2. The next year the Secretary-General's report In Larger Freedom: Towards Development, Security, and Human Rights for All presenting recommendations for action to the 60th General Assembly included a reference to the "emerging norm of the Responsibility to Protect."
3. In September 2005 the U.N. General Assembly incorporated the Responsibility to Protect principle into paragraphs 138 and 139 of the World Summit Outcome Document.
4. On April 28, 2006 these two key paragraphs of the World Summit Outcome Document were affirmed unanimously by the U.N. Security Council in its Resolution 1674 on the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict, which says:"The Security Council reaffirms the provisions of paragraphs 138 and 139 of the World Summit Outcome Document regarding the responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity."
II. The R2P principle gets applied to Darfur.
A. In March 2007 a report by the UN High-Level Mission of the Human Rights Commission on the situation in Darfur, led by Nobel Prize winner Jody Williams, disturbed by the failure of the May 2006 Darfur Peace Agreement to do much to improve the situation, called on the international community to take action, noting that the Responsibility to Protect principle required it.
1. But the government of Sudan refused to allow the Mission to enter Sudan to carry on its investigation and objected to the use of the R2P framework in the report.
2. The UN Human Rights Commission then appointed a new working group to work with the African Union and the Sudanese government on this issue, but the Sudanese government says that it has done nothing wrong and is doing what it can to protect to protect is citizens' rights.
B. Civil society is pushing the national governments to act responsibly.
1. The coordination of the NGOs in this effort is in the hands of the World Federalist Movement-Institute for Global Policy (WFM-IGP) in New York, who were asked to fulfill that task by the Canadian government. This coordination is being done under the name "Responsibility to Protect-Engaging Civil Society" or more simply "r2p-cs" (where "cs" is for "civil society"), <http://www.responsibilitytoprotect.org>. The e-mail address is <r2p-cs@wfm.org>. One success for this civil society effort was the March 14, 2007 adoption by the Board of Supervisors of the City & County of San Francisco of a "Resolution Endorsing the UN Principle of the Responsibility to Protect."
2. A global public opinion poll released April 5, 2007 by <www.WorldPublicOpinion.org> and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs showed worldwide support for applying the R2P principle to the Darfur tragedy. Referring to that poll Andrew Stroehlein and Gareth Evans noted: "On the . . . question of whether the UN Security Council has the 'responsibility to authorize the use of military force to prevent severe human rights violations such as genocide, even against the will of their own government,' strong majorities in many countries replied favorably: 74% of Americans agreed, along with 69% of Palestinians, 66% of Armenians, 64% of Israelis, 54% of French and Poles, and 51% of Indians. And all populations polled were more in favor than opposed. . . . [T]he most surprising result emerged from China. Though its government has long been considered a staunch defender of state sovereignty under just about all circumstances, a full 76% of Chinese citizens agreed the Security Council had a responsibility to intervene when such mass crimes were taking place."
III. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon calls for implementation of R2P in Sudan
A. Speaking April 9, 2007 UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said: "All the world's govern-ments have agreed in principle to the responsibility to protect. Our challenge now is to give real meaning to the concept, by taking steps to make it operational."
B. The Secretary-General then indicated that he was making his special adviser for the pre-vention of genocide (Juan Mendez of Argentina) a full-time post & that he was upgrading the UN Advisory Committee on Genocide Prevention. But so far Sudan's government still stalls
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