Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Brazilian proposal to change "responsibility to protect" to " responsibility while protecting"
to avoid a repetition of the how the UN intervention in Libya went after the initial success in protecting civilians in BenghaziTEN months ago, the UN Security Council, with no dissent, authorised the use of "all necessary measures" to protect civilians at imminent risk of massacre in Muammar Gaddafi's Libya. Those lives were saved and, if the Security Council had acted equally decisively and robustly in the 1990s, so might those of 8000 others in Srebrenica and another 800,000 in Rwanda.
I and many others hailed the agreement to intervene in Libya as the coming of age of the responsibility to protect ("R2P"
principle, unanimously embraced by the world's governments in 2005. Its core idea countering centuries of treating sovereignty almost as a license to kill is that states must protect their own people from genocide and other mass-atrocity crimes. If they manifestly fail to do so, the international community has the responsibility to act by persuasion, if possible, and by coercion, if necessary.
Now, 10 months later, the Security Council is paralysed over Syria, unable to agree not only on the extreme step of military force, but even on lesser coercive measures such as targeted sanctions, an arms embargo or referral to the International Criminal Court. The inaction comes despite a death toll of many more than 5000 and an outlook even worse than in Libya.
The hesitation partly reflects the very different geopolitics of the Syrian crisis: potentially explosive regional sectarian divisions, no Arab League unanimity in favour of tough action, a long Russian commitment to the Assad regime and a strong Syrian army, which would make any military intervention difficult and bloody.
But there is more to it than that. Security Council consensus about when and how to apply R2P has evaporated in a welter of recrimination about how the NATO-led implementation of the Libya mandate "to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack" was carried out.
In November, Brazil circulated a paper arguing that the R2P concept needs to be supplemented by a new set of principles and procedures on the theme of "responsibility while protecting". Its two key proposals are a set of criteria to be taken into account before the council mandates any use of military force, and a monitoring-and-review mechanism to ensure that such mandates' implementation is seriously debated.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/disquiet-over-libyan-win-syrias-loss/story-e6frg6ux-1226257668993
I and many others hailed the agreement to intervene in Libya as the coming of age of the responsibility to protect ("R2P"
principle, unanimously embraced by the world's governments in 2005. Its core idea countering centuries of treating sovereignty almost as a license to kill is that states must protect their own people from genocide and other mass-atrocity crimes. If they manifestly fail to do so, the international community has the responsibility to act by persuasion, if possible, and by coercion, if necessary.
Now, 10 months later, the Security Council is paralysed over Syria, unable to agree not only on the extreme step of military force, but even on lesser coercive measures such as targeted sanctions, an arms embargo or referral to the International Criminal Court. The inaction comes despite a death toll of many more than 5000 and an outlook even worse than in Libya.
The hesitation partly reflects the very different geopolitics of the Syrian crisis: potentially explosive regional sectarian divisions, no Arab League unanimity in favour of tough action, a long Russian commitment to the Assad regime and a strong Syrian army, which would make any military intervention difficult and bloody.
But there is more to it than that. Security Council consensus about when and how to apply R2P has evaporated in a welter of recrimination about how the NATO-led implementation of the Libya mandate "to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack" was carried out.
In November, Brazil circulated a paper arguing that the R2P concept needs to be supplemented by a new set of principles and procedures on the theme of "responsibility while protecting". Its two key proposals are a set of criteria to be taken into account before the council mandates any use of military force, and a monitoring-and-review mechanism to ensure that such mandates' implementation is seriously debated.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/disquiet-over-libyan-win-syrias-loss/story-e6frg6ux-1226257668993
I hadn't heard of the Brazilian proposal to change "responsibility to protect" to "responsibility while protecting". While that proposal won't get resolved anytime soon, it sounds interesting.