The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and for All

Abstract

The Responsibility toProtect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and forAll* Gareth Evans President, International Crisis Group What is at issue here can be very simply stated.Whatever else we mess up in the conduct of international affairs?in responding to deadly conflict, in responding to human-rights violations?let us at least ensure thatwe never again mess up when it comes to protecting people frommass atrocity crimes: theworst conflict and human rights cases of all, genocide, ethnic cleansing and other major crimes against humanity and war crimes. Let us get to the point thatwhen another man-made humanitarian catastrophe like Cambodia, or Rwanda, or Bosnia, or Darfur looms on the horizon, as it surely will, we will never again have to look back after another disastrous failure, asking ourselves, with a mixture of anger, incomprehension and shame, how we could possibly have let ithappen again. And let us get to the point that?when the lives of thousands or more ofmen, women and children are again at risk because a country has shown that it isunable or unwilling to end aman-made humanitarian crisis within itsborders?the reflex response around theworld is not to say, as countries have been saying for centuries, that 'it's none of our business', but rather to accept immediately that it is thebusiness of all of us, and have thedebate only about who should do what, when and how. BACKGROUND It is almost impossible to overstate the extent towhich there has been an absence of consensus on these issues in thepast. In pre-modern?including biblical?times, mass atrocities seem tohave been amatter of indifference to everyone but the victims.With the emergence of themodern system of nation states in the seventeenth century, that indifference simply became institutionalised: sovereign states did not interfere in each other's internal affairs. Certainly there were instances in the nineteenth century of European states intervening in various corners of the Ottoman Empire to protect Christian minorities at risk, and the term 'humanitarian intervention' was first used in this context. But therewas no generally accepted principle in law,morality or state tAs ofJuly2009,Mr Evans moved fromtheICG tobecome co-chairof theInternational Commission on Nulclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament. ^Openingaddress tothe Thirtieth Annual Conferenceof the Committee for International Affairs, Royal Irish Academy, Dublin, 21 November 2008. IrishStudies inInternational Affairs, Vol. 20 (2009), 7-13. doi: 10.3318/ISIA.2009.20.7 8 Irish Studies inInternational Affairs practice to challenge the core notion that itwas no-one's business but their own if statesmurdered or forcibly displaced large numbers of their own citizens, or allowed atrocity crimes to be committed by one group against another on their soil. Even afterWorld War II, with the awful experience of Hitler's Holocaust, the recognition of individual and group human rights in the UN Charter and, more grandly, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the recognition by the Nuremberg Tribunal Charter in 1945 of the concept of 'crimes against humanity' and the signingof theGenocide Convention in 1948, thingsdid not fundamentally change. The overwhelming preoccupation of those who founded theUN was not, in fact, human rights, but the problem of states waging aggressive war against each other.What actually captured themood of the time, and themood thatprevailed right through the Cold War years, was, more than any of the human-rights provisions, article 2.7 of the UN Charter: 'Nothing should authorise intervention inmatters essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any State'.1 The state ofmind that even massive atrocity crimes like those of theCambodian killing fields were just not the rest of theworld's business prevailed throughout the UN's first half-century of existence: Vietnam's invasion, which stopped theKhmer Rouge in its tracks, was universally attacked, not applauded; and Tanzania had to justify itsoverthrow of Uganda's IdiAmin by invoking 'self-defence', not any larger human-rights justification. With the arrival of the 1990s, and the end of the Cold War, the prevailing complacent assumptions about non-intervention did at last come under challenge as never before. The quintessential peace and security problem?before the 11 September 2001 attacks on theUS came along to change the focus to terrorism? became not interstatewar...