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| You are here: 2004 / Workshops, Panels and Seminars / Track 2, Responsibilities: Individual, National and Multilateral / Presentation Option Paper, by Mr. Gareth Evans | |||||||||
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Participants Countries and organizations Conference documentation Conference programme 
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Report from Workshop Track 2, Responsibilities: Individual, National and Multilateral Presentation Option Paper, by Mr. Gareth Evans Presentation Option Paper, by Mr. Carl Tham Presentation Option Paper, by Mr. Diego E. Arria Presentation, Option Paper, by Dr. Payam Akhavan Presenttation, Option Paper, by Dr. Larry D. Johnson Presentation, Option Paper, by Ms. Edina Becirevic Presentation, Option Paper, by Dr. Samina Ahmed Presentation, Option Paper, by Mr. Richard Dicker Presentation , Option Paper, by Ms. Natasa Kandic Presentation Option Paper, by Mr. Gareth Evans Evans, Gareth STATE SOVEREIGNTY AND THE RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT When it comes to crafting new rules and establishing new practices of a kind that would make the slogan ‘No More Rwandas’ unshakeable reality, the biggest obstacle to international consensus unquestionably remains national sovereignty. All states hate the idea they might be the target of a coercive external intervention. Latin American states – as Diego Arrias will remind us – are particularly sensitive given the history of the region. The many post-colonial states, who have so recently acquired independent sovereign status, don’t much like the idea of yielding up any part of it – but that sentiment is stronger in Asia than sub-Saharan Africa, where the despair in recent years has been as much about the lack of intervention as its happening. And there is still a tenacious perception on the part of those of many of those most likely to do the intervening – particularly the US, but not confined to it it - that their national sovereignty demands maximum freedom of action, unrestrained by new formal rules or even informal guidelines. Maybe any attempt to change perceptions and behaviour on this issue is doomed to ultimate frustration, but the most substantial effort so far to identify the relevant principles, and build an international consensus around them, has been the work of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), which published its report, The Responsibility to Protect, in December 2001. The Commission made, I think it is fair to say, four main contributions to the international policy debate. The first, and perhaps ultimately the politically most useful, was to invent a new way of talking about the whole issue of humanitarian intervention. We sought to turn the whole weary debate about the ‘right to intervene’ on its head, and to recharacterise it not as an argument about any ‘right’ at all, but rather about a ‘responsibility’ – one to protect people at grave risk – with the relevant perspective being not that of the prospective interveners but, more appropriately, those needing support. This new language has been helpful already in taking some of the heat and emotion out of the policy debate, requiring the actors to change their lines, and think afresh about what are the real issues are. Our hope - and so far our experience - is that entrenched opponents will find new ground on which to more constructively engage, just as proved to be the case between developers and environmentalists after the Brundtland Commission introduced the concept of ‘sustainable development’. The second contribution of the Commission, perhaps most conceptually significant, was to come up with a new way of talking about sovereignty: argued that its essence should now be seen not as control but as responsibility. The UN Charter’s explicit language emphasises the respect owed to state sovereignty in its traditional Westphalian sense, but actual state practice has evolved in the nearly 60 years since the Charter was signed: the new focus on human rights and, more recently, on human security, emphasises the limits of sovereignty. We spelt out the implications of that change by arguing that sovereignty implies responsibilities as well as rights: to be sovereign means that “the state authorities are responsible for the functions of protecting the safety and lives of citizens and promotion of their welfare”; that “the national political authorities are responsible to the citizens internally and to the international community through the UN”. The starting point is that an individual state has the primary responsibility to protect the individuals within it. But that’s not the finishing point: where the state fails in that responsibility, a secondary responsibility falls on the international community acting through the U.N. As we put it, “Where a population is suffering serious harm, as a result of internal war, insurgency, repression or state failure, and the state in question is unwilling or unable to halt or avert it, the principle of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect.” The key point, and it is one very respectful of the concern about protecting the concept of sovereignty that one hears about so much in this part of the world - is that the responsibility to protect lies on both the state and on the international community as a whole. The third contribution of the Commission was to make it clear that the ‘responsibility to protect’ was about much more than intervention, and in particular military intervention. It extends to a whole continuum of obligations: qthe responsibility to prevent: to address both the root causes and direct causes of internal conflict and other man-made crises putting populations at risk; qthe responsibility to react: to respond to situations of compelling human need with appropriate measures, which may include coercive measures like sanctions and international prosecution, and in extreme cases military intervention; and qthe responsibility to rebuild: to provide, particularly after a military intervention, full assistance with recovery, reconstruction and reconciliation, addressing the causes of the harm the intervention was designed to halt or avert. Of these three dimensions to the responsibility to protect, the Commission made very clear its view that prevention was the single most important: we spent a lot of time spelling out preventive strategies, both long term and short term, and also made clear that, as a matter of principle, the exercise of the responsibility to both prevent and react should always involve less intrusive and coercive measures being considered before more coercive and intrusive ones are applied. But that said, the question of military action remains the central one in the debate. Whatever else it encompasses, the responsibility to protect implies above all else a responsibility to react - where necessary coercively, and in extreme cases with military coercion - to situations of compelling need for human protection. So the fourth contribution of the Commission was to come up with some guidelines for when military action is appropriate, six of them in fact: (1)Just Cause: is the harm threatened, external or internal, sufficiently clear and serious to justify going to war? (2)Right Intention: is the primary purpose of the proposed military action to halt or avert the external or internal threat in question, whatever other motives may be in play? (3)Last Resort: has every non-military option for the prevention or peaceful resolution of the crisis been explored, with reasonable grounds for believing lesser measures will not succeed? (4)Proportional Means: is the scale, duration and intensity of the planned military action the minimum necessary to secure the defined human protection objective? (5)Reasonable Prospects: is there a reasonable chance of the military action being successful in meeting the external or internal threat in question, with the consequences of action not likely to be worse than the consequences of inaction? (6)Right Authority: is the military action lawful? It will be apparent that the formulation of these principles owes much to traditional ‘just war’ theory, and that for some may be a turn-off. But I believe, as did the ICISS Commission, that these principles owe their force not to any theological doctrine but to their intuitive acceptability. And they are certainly intended to reflect universal, not just Western, values.
… It is wrong to be cynical about the power of ideas to influence the world of government and intergovernmental action. If well formulated, well argued, expressed in language that can readily be understood, they can and do have an impact – however cynical, sceptical or indifferent to general principles (as distinct from case by case ‘on the merits’ ad hoccery), the practitioners of that world may seem, and indeed think themselves, to be. Ideas do matter. The Brundtland Commission, for example, by inventing the concept of “sustainable development”, created a wholly new basis for constructive dialogue – previously utterly lacking – between pro-development and pro-environment activists and policy makers the world over. As much as we might hope otherwise, nothing is more certain than that the international community will be confronted again by events all too resonant of the 1990s agonies in the Great Lakes, the Balkans, Haiti, Somalia, Sudan, Sierra Leone, East Timor and elsewhere–and sooner rather than later. Reacting to these situations in the ad hoc and often quite ineffective or counter-productive way that we have to date is no longer the kind of luxury we can afford as interdependent global neighbours. If the Commission’s report, with its new emphasis on “the responsibility to protect” as the central governing theme, can help bring about a more systematic, balanced and less ideological debate of the main issues by the international community – and - even more if it can provide an accepted framework for dealing with these matters as they arise in future in concrete and positive ways – then we won’t have been wasting our time. >> Back to top |
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Introduction Opening Session Plenary Sessions Workshops, Panels and Seminars
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