View previous stories
	Major Powers and the Contested Evolution of a ‘Responsibility to Protect’ by Global Public Policy Institute, agencies   25 September 2014   “Regulating the UN Security Council veto in the event of mass atrocities”, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Zeid Al Hussein.   I would like to thank the organisers of this meeting, France and Mexico, for leading this important discussion on "whether" the UN Security Council’s permanent members should refrain from using the veto in situations of mass atrocities.   The privileges granted by the UN Charter to the Council’s Permanent Members come with responsibilities of course. For the proper functioning and the legitimacy of the UN collective security system, it is crucial the Council acts – and is seen to be acting – in ways that further the objective of securing global peace and security, in conformity with justice and international law. The short-term political, economic or commercial interests of one State, should not trump this or, at the very least, should provide no shelter to those who perpetrate gross human rights violations, crimes against humanity, war crimes or genocide – the world’s worst criminals.   All Member States, including the Council’s permanent members, have legal obligations regarding protection of the lives and dignity of human beings. These include peremptory norms, or jus cogens obligations, that are incumbent on all States; and other obligations arising from States’ accession to specific treaties. States must respect the objects and purposes of the relevant norms and treaties, and must at the very least refrain from undermining them.   Thus, Member States should refrain from decisions which would undermine or obstruct action that seeks to further these norms. Surely a State-Party to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which has undertaken to prevent and punish genocide, should not, according to this logic, impede collective action of the Security Council that is intended to prevent genocide?   And in the case of grave breaches of international humanitarian law or war crimes, then surely States-party to the 1949 Geneva Conventions – as are all five permanent Council Members – which have committed not only to respect those Conventions but also to ensure their respect – should not block action by the Council that would uphold these Conventions?   It is a moral and a legal obligation to save lives. In recent years, the Council’s inability to take decisive action regarding a number of appalling crises has led to enormous, avoidable, human suffering. It has shaken confidence in our own institutions. It has granted time and space to the perpetrators to commit more violations, and made them far less likely to provide access to UN officials or to respond to their concerns.   Therefore, from the human rights perspective, the adoption of a code of conduct on use of the veto, in very specific circumstances where well-founded facts demonstrate that international crimes are occurring or about to occur, would demonstrate on the part of the permanent members of the Council that quality of leadership and responsibility which our world so badly needs.   The status quo is ultimately harmful for all, primarily for the victims of course, but also for the Council’s standing and legitimacy, and therefore for the capacity of the UN to deliver peace and stability where they are needed most desperately, on the ground.   Members of the Council have been mandated to act collectively in the pursuit of peace and security. They have a clear and urgent responsibility towards the women, men and children who are threatened by war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. The power to use the veto is, like all powers, a power to be exercised responsibly.   A commitment not to use the veto when quick and decisive action is needed to avert or halt gross human rights violations, war crimes and other international crimes would have a powerful preventive effect: would-be perpetrators may, in many instances, refrain from engaging in such crimes if they expect the Council to act promptly and decisively.   http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=15103&LangID=E   Major Powers and the Contested Evolution of a ‘Responsibility to Protect’. (Global Public Policy Institute)   The debate about a responsibility to protect people from mass atrocities goes to the heart of current changes in the world. Coinciding with the shift of power and influence away from the West, its nascent and contested evolution as a norm has become a crucial arena in which fundamental conflicts about the future global order play out – far beyond simplistic dichotomies between ‘North’ and ‘South’ or ‘West’ and ‘Rest’.   This special issue analyses how Brazil, China, Europe, India, Russia, South Africa and the United States engaged with these struggles over sovereignty and responsibility, universalism and exceptionalism, hypocrisy and selectivity. The papers pursue three goals: to study major powers’ normative foreign policies in their historical, institutional and cultural background, to bring the role of major powers back into the analysis of norm development and to expand on the standard narrative about the evolution of ‘R2P’ by embedding it in a more global, less-Western centric context.   Introduction: Major powers and the contested evolution of a responsibility to protect - Philipp Rotmann, Gerrit Kurtz, Sarah Brockmeier. GPPi, Berlin   Regulating Intervention: Brazil and the Responsibility to Protect - Oliver Stuenkel, Marcos Tourinho. Fundação Getulio Varga, São Paolo   In the last decade, Brazil has engaged with the idea of an international Responsibility to Protect in a notable fashion. As a frequent member of the Security Council in the post-Cold War era, the country resisted suggestions of a responsibility to intervene in humanitarian crises, fearing it would serve to justify military action outside of the scope of the UN Charter and international law. Following the adoption of R2P in the 2005 World Summit, Brazil engaged with the concept more closely. This culminated in the ‘Responsibility while Protecting’, a proposed addendum that would ensure clearer criteria and greater accountability of UN-authorised military interventions. This paper describes Brazilian foreign policy perspectives through this period and analyses their contribution to the political and normative development of R2P. It argues that while Brazil has become more vocal and proactive in relation to the norm in recent years, its positions remained driven by some of its most traditional foreign policy arguments: the strengthening of the authority of the UN Security Council and the establishment of a multilateral order in which all states are treated equally.   Debates in China about the Responsibility to Protect as a Developing International Norm: A General Assessment - Liu Tiewa, Zhang Haibin, Peking University, China   Over the past several decades, international debates over intervention have usually focused on the primacy of state sovereignty or the protection of human rights. The emergence of the Responsibility to Protect stimulates more profound debates by providing different perspectives and terminologies. In this vein, an important voice of dissent, or at least skepticism, comes from China. This article pays special attention to the domestic debates concerning the R2P concept in China. Based on a review of most of the academic studies on R2P in China, together with in-depth interviews with senior diplomats and practitioners, this article illustrates the different views of Chinese officials and scholars on the concept of R2P, offering insight into how to construct the new norm of R2P in order to shape the concept into an international norm that is more acceptable, legitimate and operational.   Emerging Norm and Rhetorical Tool: Europe and a Responsibility to Protect - Sarah Brockmeier, Gerrit Kurtz, Julian Junk, Peace Research Institute, Frankfurt GPPi, Berlin   European governments, parliaments and civil societies belong to the most important supporters of a ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P). However, despite a shared positive attitude towards R2P and coordinated diplomatic efforts, major European governments and therefore the European Union (EU) have never reached a consensual position on R2P. Based on 47 expert interviews and a review of official government documents, the article analyses the positions of France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the common EU institutions across a series of critical junctures of the R2P debate between 2005 and 2013. The authors find that Paris and London agree with Berlin and Brussels that R2P requires longer term multilateral norm building. Yet, while Germany stresses military restraint and civilian crisis prevention, France and the UK continue to view R2P through their pre-existing traditions of a droit d’ingérence and the ‘doctrine of a humanitarian intervention’, respectively. These differences are largely due to diverging strategic cultures based on different historical lessons on the use of force. Brussels’ efforts to coordinate a common EU position have been constrained by these diverging positions.   Singing the Tune of Sovereignty? India and the Responsibility to Protect - J. Madhan Mohan, Gerrit Kurtz. Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Dehli. GPPi, Berlin   With an ostensible commitment to sovereignty and non-intervention and a long standing involvement in United Nations peacekeeping operations, India’s position on R2P seems puzzling. Still, despite the rhetoric about India being an ‘emerging power’, it often abstains from diplomatic engagement beyond its region, including in R2P situations. What explains its sceptical interpretation, cautious attitude and limited practice? The paper shows that India’s position has evolved in three phases since 2005, from scepticism via calibrated engagement to renewed suspicions after the fall out of the Libya intervention. The paper argues that mainly domestic factors can account for these changes in India’s R2P policy. Despite these changes, however, India’s main concerns with R2P display remarkable consistency: an insistence on the consent of the state, a narrow definition of its scope involving a high threshold of violence, the exclusive authority of the UN Security Council and a deeply ingrained scepticism towards the utility of the use of force.   Multipolarity as Resistance to Liberal Norms: Russia"s Position on Responsibility to Protect - Xymena Kurowska, Central European University, Budapest   In Western analysis, Russia’s insistence on the supremacy of international law serves as little more than a strategy to sustain parity with the West. The Kremlin’s justification of its use of responsibility to protect is seen as an abuse of humanitarian language and a smokescreen in the pursuit of geopolitical interests. Formulated from within the liberal paradigm, such interpretations underestimate the normative saturation of strategic action. This article examines Russia’s discourse of multipolarity not as being purely strategic—as is widely held—but rather as a form of resistance to the perceived liberal hegemony of the West. The effects of such resistance resemble the outcomes of strategic manoeuvring but they should not be reduced to such. Bolstered by a sense of betrayal by the West, Russia’s evolving discourse of multipolarity provides an alternative vision of the world order that contests the imposition of liberal values and bestows upon the authorities an actual responsibility to contain the West’s dominance. Both Russia’s interpretation of responsibility to protect and its position in the debate arise from this agenda.   "Our Identity is our Currency": South Africa, the Responsibility to Protect and the Logic of African Intervention - Harry Verhoeven, CSR Murthy, Ricardo Soares de Oliveira. University of Oxford, Oxford, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi   Heavyweights of South Africa’s ruling African National Congress claim that the responsibility to protect citizens in case of an unwilling or unable government is an African concept, owned by the continent: rooted in the security-development crisis of the past few decades, Pretoria stresses that there is an intellectual and political history of intervention, separate from Western conceptions of R2P. While the conception of an African responsibility to protect has come to constitute a major pillar of South African foreign policy, this is not without its critics -domestic or abroad- and, as the Libya case exemplifies, often presents decision-makers in Pretoria with tough real world dilemmas. South Africa shares the intense scepticism of China and Russia about Western claims of value-based foreign policies. But much as anti-imperialist ideology and growth-centred relations with other emerging powers inform South African foreign policy, it would be a mistake to see Pretoria’s scepticism about Western interpretations as a sign of profound normative convergence with Russian and Chinese critiques of liberal peace-building: the South African critique of the responsibility to protect is more procedural than substantive.   The Two-Level Politics of Support: US Foreign Policy and the Responsibility to Protect - Julian Junk, Peace Research Institute, Frankfurt   This article investigates the US foreign and security policy with regard to the ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P). Based on the analysis of expert interviews and official documents, it traces the US position on R2P across critical junctures between the principle’s 2005 adoption at the UN World Summit and its latest invocations in the Syrian crises of 2013. It discusses the recent atrocity prevention agenda of the US government as ambitious and still evolving operationalization of R2P. The article reveals several patterns in US attitude and practices towards R2P across recent administrations: The avoidance of new obligations in international law despite a general supportive attitude towards R2P; a deeply-rooted pragmatism that leads to the development of practical tools that follow-up on the principles it commits to, even if R2P language had to be avoided in domestic politics; and a constant balancing act between domestic- and international-level politics. Visit the related web page
	History will condemn climate change denialists by Robert Manne La Trobe University   The argument for radical action on climate change– which Australia will reject with the shameful decision to repeal the carbon tax – is embarrassingly simple.   For the past 200 years, western culture has granted science pre-eminent cultural authority. A quarter century ago, a consensus formed among contemporary scientists specialising in the study of the climate. The consensus comprised one principal idea: the primary source of energy on which industrial civilisation relied – the burning of fossil fuels – was dangerously increasing the temperature of the earth.   Thousands upon thousands of scientific studies have been conducted estimating the impact of this warming. Hundreds of outstanding books have been published making the conclusions of the scientists available to the general public. To anyone willing to listen, these scientists have explained that unless human beings derive their energy from sources other than fossil fuels, the future that we face over the next decades and centuries involves the rendering of large parts of the earth uninhabitable to humans and other species – through the melting of the ice caps and glaciers and thus steadily rising sea levels, the acidification of the oceans, the destruction of forests and coral reefs, and the increase in the prevalence and intensity of famines, insect-borne diseases, droughts, bush fires, floods, hurricanes and heat-waves.   Climate scientists also explained that radical action on climate change could not be delayed. The carbon dioxide being emitted by human activity would remain in the atmosphere for a century or longer. The damage our generation was inflicting on the earth and its inhabitants was irreversible and therefore terminal. In human history, the scientists warned, there had been so far been no catastrophe even remotely as serious or as grave as the one we were about to face if we failed to take timely action against impending climate change.   So far, the warnings issued by the climate scientists have gone largely unheeded. In 1997 the international community that gathered at Kyoto produced a desperately inadequate agreement to curb greenhouse gas emissions. In every year following Kyoto, emissions steadily rose. The international community re-assembled at Copenhagen in 2009. Virtually nothing of significance was agreed. Emissions continued to rise. The modest reductions that have been achieved in recent years among the advanced industrial economies – either through market mechanisms, or the economic downturn following the global financial crisis, or the temporary movement in the US from coal to natural gas – have been more than cancelled out by very rapid increases in emissions produced in the emerging economies like China and India now seeking their own place in the industrial sun.   As global emissions increased, something surpassingly strange occurred in the realm of politics in the US – something without parallel in the history of the post-Enlightenment west since the Darwinian controversy. The emergence of a broad-based movement of thought challenging the sovereignty of science in one specialised field.   Anti-science climate change denialism began with money cynically and strategically supplied by the massive American fossil fuel corporations. From there it spread to the powerful US network of neo-liberal "think-tanks" whose purpose was to produce the ideas helping to make the world safe for the wealthiest members of the society – the so-called 1%. And from the think-tanks climate change denialism steadily spread downwards to American society more generally, thanks to rabid right wing media like Fox News, until it was powerful enough to capture, almost in its entirety, one of America’s traditional political parties, the republicans.   As a consequence of the spread of climate change denialism, tens of millions of American citizens now base their opinions on the kind of pseudo-knowledge manufactured by the climate change denialist blogs and disseminated daily by the right-wing media. They have come to treat the questions of whether the earth is warming, and if so why, as political matters concerning which those without any genuine scientific understanding or training are as qualified to form an opinion as professors who have devoted their lives to one of the disciplines of climate science.   Climate change denialism soon spread beyond the US, especially to the countries of the English-speaking world. As Australia is a country extremely sensitive to the cultural winds blowing in from the US, reliant on the export and consumption of coal, and where the denialist Murdoch newspapers exercise enormous unhealthy influence, it is hardly surprising that over the past decade climate change denialism quickly sunk deep roots here.   The impact was seen in late 2009 with the coup inside the Liberal party which replaced Malcolm Turnbull, a rational believer in climate science, by a climate change sceptic Tony Abbott, who regarded and still regards climate science as "crap".   Abbott was elected by the right-wing of his party to end meaningful action in Australia against the threat of climate change.   The right-wing denialists, now dominant within the Conservative Coalition parties, often call themselves conservatives. They are not. At the heart of true conservatism is the belief that each new generation forms the vital bridge between past and future, and is charged with the responsibility of passing the earth to their children and grandchildren in sound order.   History will condemn the climate change denialists, here and elsewhere, for their contribution to the coming catastrophe that their cupidity, their arrogance, their myopia and their selfishness have bequeathed to the young and the generations still unborn. Visit the related web page
	View more stories