Executive Summary
The responsibility to protect is one of the significant
international human rights achievements in the 21st century. After the humanitarian crisis in Rwanda and
the Balkans in the 1990s, the international community strove to establish basic
guidelines for acting against human rights violations when states failed to
protect the people they rule. In 2005,
the UN World Summit finally codified the basic tenants of responsibility to
protect and use force in cases of last resort.
In the 2010s, the responsibility to protect has faced a midlife crisis
as multiple humanitarian crises have brought about many questions of the
doctrine's usefulness.
The issues of the responsibility to protect are around
the inconsistent application of the doctrine, varying political will on the
various crisis on a case-by-case basis, brazen national self-interest
overriding the doctrine’s altruistic intent, and institutional gridlock at the
UN Security Council level. The responsibility to protect challenges existing
norms of non-intervention, state sovereignty, and self-interest policy motives.
All these issues are interconnected, resulting in improving responsibility to
protect an immensely challenging prospect.
Policymakers should embark on the necessary reforms
required to improve the effectiveness of the responsibility to protect, which
still serves as the best tool to address mass atrocities when states fail in
their obligation to provide the necessary human security. This report suggests three recommendations to
policymakers: 1) Adopt a “prevention-reaction-rebuilding” framework. 2) External state and international organization
operations need to partner up with target state institutions, civil society,
and individuals to build a “whole approach” concept to construct sufficient
capacity-building and resiliency against mass atrocities. 3) Undertake reform
of the UN Security Council through permanent membership expansion and veto
reform to prevent self-interest interference and clarify the action guidance
towards acting against genocide, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity.
Adopting these recommendations would improve cost-benefit analysis for policymakers away from the high costs of reaction towards lower costs of prevention through the “prevent-react-rebuild” framework. Additionally, it would provide for more effective, long-lasting solutions to at-risk states facing mass atrocities by relying and strengthening on locally built best practices. Reforms to the UN Security Council would address the gridlock that has plagued states from acting to protect human lives from mass atrocities. The increasing spillover effects of these humanitarian crises threaten the international system's legitimacy and stability as these localized conflicts grow into enormous transnational security and stability issues.
Introduction
In the 1990s, the international
community advancements towards safeguarding human rights confronted a complicated
question, what is the role and responsibilities of individual states,
international organizations, and the international community towards states
that fail to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic
cleansing, and crimes against humanity?
Wrangling over the debate between respecting national sovereignty,
humanitarian intervention, and safeguarding human rights has become one of the
most critical human rights issues in the 21st century that has
formulated the doctrine known as the responsibility to protect. Human rights violations against people within
national borders have challenged the absoluteness of state sovereignty from
various events from the Balkans, Rwanda, Syria, and Myanmar. While the responsibility to protect has
become an international norm, there are still significant shortfalls with the
doctrine due to the proliferation of the lack of impactful action in many human
rights atrocities currently underway in Libya, Syria, and Myanmar. This paper makes recommendations towards
strengthening preventive measures, capacity building, and partnering with local
actors to be significant action measures that external individual states,
international organizations, and the international community can implement to
solidify the intent of the responsibility to protect doctrine below the
threshold of forceful humanitarian intervention.
Background
The
end of the Cold War redirected international efforts towards addressing human
security and how violations of people's safety by internal state actions under
the abuse of national sovereignty principles was an unsettling normative
behavior. Two pivotal atrocities and subsequent responses conducted in the
1990s in the Balkans and Rwanda led the international community to formulate
how to address the question of the use of force in humanitarian intervention
and other ways and means to address systematic violations of human rights
within states (United Nations, n.d.). In
2001, an independent, Canadian-led International Commission on Intervention and
State Sovereignty (ICISS) established itself to provide additional guidance on
the right of humanitarian intervention via coercive measures, mainly through
military force (Bellamy & Luck, 2018).
The ICISS grappled with competing humanitarian and sovereignty norms to
shift the discussion from a 'right to intervene' towards 'the responsibility to
protect, expanding the concept from reaction to include prevention and
rebuilding in the hopes of navigating through changing norms (Bellamy &
Luck, 2018). The ICISS efforts'
culminated through the 2005 UN World Summit that resulted in codifying
responsibility to protect within paragraphs 138 and 139 of the UN World Summit
Outcome document (A/RES/60/1) (United Nations, n.d.).
The
2005 UN World Summit helped establish two foundational idea changes to global
politics: state sovereignty comes with responsibilities and global
responsibility to protect people threatened by significant human rights
atrocities (Thakur & Maley, 2015, p. 3). The application of the
responsibility to protect received further policy formulation from UN
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (2009) that established three pillars of
implementation:
1)
protection responsibilities of the State
2) international assistance and
capacity-building
3)
timely, decisive, and proportionate response when a state fails in its pillar
one obligations
Between
2011 and 2015, the responsibility to protect doctrine has been mentioned in
crises in Syria, Libya, Yemen, Islamic State in Iraq, Central African Republic,
South Sudan, Sudan in Darfur and Abyei, Mali, Democratic Republic of Congo,
Somalia, and Cote d'Ivoire which has been accompanied by a multifaceted
international response (Bellamy & Luck, 2018). In current humanitarian crises, the
responsibility to protect is not referenced to Gaza, Nigeria against Boko
Haram, Myanmar, and North Korea (Bellamy & Luck, 2018). While the responsibility to protect has
become more entrenched as an international norm, it is evident that various
constraints continue to plague the responsibility to protect doctrine from what
accounts for adequate fulfillment of the principle.
Existing
Shortfalls of Responsibility to Protect Doctrine
While the responsibility to protect
doctrine has received a sufficient normative foothold in international law;
however, the doctrine has extensive shortfalls with the inconsistent
application, lack of political will, self-interest interference, and institutional
gridlock. Two of the most significant
responsibility to protect cases in the 2010s has been the crisis in Libya and
Syria with different actions that have influenced the principle's scope and
effectiveness (Plunkett, 2020, p. 783).
Bellinger (2020, p. 372) notes that the context of Western-led
humanitarian intervention has been historically fraught with self-interest
primarily in mind at the very expense of the people they claim to be helping.
The consequences of action in Libya have been compared to the results of
inaction in Syria. Both have led to long-term stability issues and continued
issues around protecting people from human rights atrocities due to not
considering local interests (Bellinger, 2020, p. 390). Putra and Cangara (2019,
p. 63) classify this weakness as a purposeful misinterpretation of the
responsibility to protect doctrine by external states to fulfill national
interests only has put immense pressure on the doctrine's effectiveness.
Another weakness to the responsibility to protect
principle is the lack of accurate assessment by advocates to assess the correct
cost and benefits framework beyond chronological response regarding the 2009 UN
Secretary-General’s three pillars of implication (Ballamy & Luck, 2018). A
significant hurdle to overcome by state decision-makers is the “prevention
dilemma” since consequences of action and inaction are impossible to fully know
the impact of a certain course of action that states are strongly risk-averse
(Ballamy & Luck, 2018). The world
has not approached atrocities in the simultaneous metric of prevention,
reaction, and rebuilding while mainly looking towards the high costs of
response once atrocities are underway.
In hindsight, prevention measures are typically significantly lower in
cost than atrocity response and rebuilding; however, external actors have a
difficult time and interest in investing appropriately in effective
case-by-case preventive measures.
Existing institutional gridlock at the UN Security
Council (UNSC) level has left the most overt application of the responsibility
to protect via military force continuous at the table since the 2011 Libya
intervention (Babbitt, 2017, pp. 432-433).
UNSC vetoes from Russia and China have continuously prevented military
force in significant numbers in Syria, Yemen, and other places (Babbitt, 2017,
p. 433). The overt attention surrounding military force potential and actual
use have unhelpfully narrowed the responsibility to protect doctrine scope from
its ICISS intentions towards full-spectrum prevention-reaction-rebuilding.
Additionally, the institutional gridlock is directly influenced by each state’s
cost-benefit analysis towards inaction and advancing their national
self-interest within the UNSC. Political
opposition to approving military force in responsibility to protect has
national self-interest as UNSC members have no reason to believe in altruistic
reasoning to any military response part of the responsibility to protect. The implementation of the responsibility to
protect is incredibly political and delicate to all actors throughout the
framework. Despite the existing
weaknesses and overt political nature surrounding responsibility to protect,
the framework is still the best case for the international community to
confront internally driven atrocities.
Recommendations
to Strengthen Responsibility to Protect
This report makes several recommendations to help
invigorate the responsibility to protect doctrine:
- Revisiting ICISS
“prevention-reaction-rebuilding” framework for policymakers to consider a
plethora of non-military means
- External actors and international
organizations rely more on capacity building approaches with the target state
institutions and civil society to enhance prevention measures
- Reform of the UN Security Council
Many
of the challenges facing implementing the responsibility to protect will not
disappear; however, that does not mean that doctrine is dead. The responsibility to protect principle needs
another shift that returns it towards the 2001 ICISS report that drives towards
conflict prevention. Plunkett (2020, p.
802) notes that the current interpretation of responsibility to protect is a
culture of reaction instead of a culture of prevention. Such a shift would move the responsibility to
protect doctrine more firmly into the diplomatic and non-military means. One such means of diplomacy would be
mediation efforts as advocated by Babbitt (2020, p. 433) in Kenya in 2007 and
Cote d’Ivoire in 2010 to prevent further escalation and atrocities. The ICISS report focused on four prevention
areas: 1) Early warning, 2. Diplomacy, 3. Ending impunity, and 4. Preventive
deployments (Thakur & Maley, 2015, p. 158-159). Returning the responsibility to protect
doctrine back towards the ICISS report's intention would significantly reduce
the hanging problems by employing the “last resort” measures of military force.
McLoughlin (2016, p. 473) points out a 2013
UN report on responsibility to protect that examines risk factors and
resiliency sources towards why some do not experience mass atrocities. It is primarily acknowledged that when mass
atrocities happen in states, it is the forces of the state and society within
that state that construct or breakdown resiliency against atrocity. “Root
causes” of mass atrocities are not significantly influenced by external actors,
so external states and international organizations need to be cognizant that
domestic actors have the most significant level of success and ownership to
prevent crimes against humanity (McLoughlin, 2016, pp. 483-484). Local actors' understanding of existing risk
management efforts can help with the cost-benefit analysis of external actors
to strengthen existing positive processes that do not require enormous
resources and haphazard strategies.
Brigg (2018, pp. 846-847) that external humanitarian efforts cannot
solve complex humanitarian issues in Geneva or New York but being on-the-ground
to achieve effective prevention and protection efforts in target areas. Local
and individual actors are still suspect to the same motivational issues that
plague states in maintaining unfair political orders that reinforce atrocities.
External actors need to be aware on a case-by-case basis of whether or not they
should work with certain actors and their motives. Top-down external approaches
to conflict resolution against mass atrocities have always been problematic,
and eliminating the hierarchical approach to increase local input can drive
greater local ownership to resolve human rights issues (Brigg, 2018, p. 847). Partnering with local actors can drive
effective external actor operations towards favorable outcomes in conflict
resolution, which hinges on external partners' excellent understanding of local
actors.
Lastly,
the UN Security Council's reform is necessary to enhance the responsibility of
protect doctrine to couple it to the national interest to make the
international system more credible to the eyes of everyone. While former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan
in 2003 proposed several UNSC structure reforms that stalled because of the
amount of state brazenly promoting self-interest in the current permanent five
structure and concerns of neo-imperialism from weak enforcement of
responsibility to protect if abused (Banteka, 2015, p. 21). One of the more comfortable measures to
reforming the structure of the UNSC via procedural method is to advocate
towards responsibility not to veto (Banteka, 2015, p. 7). The idea behind the responsibility not to
veto from the permanent members of the UNSC was brought up in the 2005 UN World
Summit. Still, it did not get into the final document due to significant
pressure from the permanent members (Banteka, 2015, p. 7). Not using the permanent member veto in cases
of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity is
becoming an increasingly clear need due to the knock off effects from the poor
management of resolving the humanitarian crisis so far in the 21st
century. These mass atrocities occurring
within national borders in places like Syria, Libya, Sudan, Myanmar, and others
have created significant spillover effects that make them transnational
security issues. The permanent members
of the UNSC cannot keep sweeping the self-interest veto power indefinitely as
it creating a global security issue that is way beyond the scope of
responsibility to protect. Necessary
UNSC reforms would enhance both international security efforts and bolster
responsibility to protect.
Conclusion
The development of the responsibility of protect doctrine
is among the most critical developments in international human rights in the 21st
century. Despite the challenges the
doctrine has faced against embedded norms of non-intervention, absolute state
sovereignty, and self-interest, the responsibility to protect has established
an entrenched beachhead that focuses on the common humanity and their rights
regardless of borders. Improving
responsibility to protect requires acknowledging the large amount of work to
make it a more attractive tool for policymakers. Making responsibility to protect as a proper,
useful tool for policymakers requires three suggestions: 1) Returning to the
ICISS “prevention-reaction-rebuilding” framework away from military force
options. 2. External actors need to partner effectively with target state
institutions and civil society for a “whole approach” to resolving potential
conflict and atrocities. 3). The structure of the UN Security Council needs to
be reformed from preventing vetoing based on self-interest and enabling
atrocities. These suggestions would
enhance the standing of states who advocate for these reforms and bolster the
legitimacy of the international state-based system that is in dire need of new
structures of accountability.
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