International Organizations and the Implementation of the Responsibility to Protect

The Humanitarian Crisis in Syria

Daniel Silander, Don Wallace

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138729353
• eBook ISBN: 9781317486558
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

This book seeks to understand the obligation of the international community to implement the principles of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P).

With a focus on the humanitarian crisis in Syria, the volume examines what formal responsibility and actual capability international institutions have to protect and prevent civilians from systematic mass atrocities and presents an analysis of several prominent international organizations (IOs). Each chapter focuses on a specific organization and explores their formal responsibilities and how these pertain to the obligations of the R2P. Existing capabilities and actual abilities to address the challenges of R2P are analysed by looking at these issues before, during, and after the occurrence of the humanitarian crisis in Syria.

With the UN not fully engaged in the Syrian conflict, the systematic human rights abuses have engendered greater attention on other organizations. This volume argues that if the UN Security Council's inactions result in an abdication of responsibilities under the UN Charter, there should not only be a discussion of how the UN must alter its approach, but also an examination of whether there are alternative R2P paths for other MNOs to take in the name of international peace and human security.

This book will be of much interest to students of R2P, humanitarian intervention, international organisations, Middle Eastern politics and security studies.

1 Introduction

Daniel Silander and Don Wallace

DOI: 10.4324/9781315709642-1

Millions of human beings remain at the mercy of civil wars, insurgencies, state repression and state collapse. This is a stark and undeniable reality, and it is at the heart of all the issues with which this Commission has been wrestling. What is at stake here is not making the world safe for big powers, or trampling over the sovereign rights of small ones, but delivering practical protection for ordinary people, at risk of their lives, because their states are unwilling or unable to protect them.

(International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, 2001, p. 11).

In the fall of 2013, it appeared to the world that some form of armed intervention by the United States (US) and like-minded Western powers in the Syrian conflict was inevitable. This intervention, coming on the heels of a reluctant acknowledgement by the US that chemical weapons had been used by the Syrian government on its own people, would be to alleviate their suffering. However, the intervention did not occur. Using its significant influence over the country, Russia was able to convince the Syrian government to accept an unenthusiastic offer by the US to enter negotiations to remove the chemical weapons.

Today, although the efforts to remove these weapons are occurring, the Syrian government has the upper hand in the conflict. The war-weary Syrian public stumbles through a country that has been ravaged by civil war. In December 2013, the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon raised his estimate on the death toll in Syria's civil war to more than 100,000, up from an estimate of nearly 93,000 just over a month earlier (Lederer, 2013). The Oxford Research Group estimated that, by the end of August 2013, 11,420 children aged 17 years and younger had been recorded killed in the Syrian conflict, out of a total of 113,735 civilians and combatants killed (Salama and Dardagan, 2013). In late March 2014, the United Nations (UN) stressed that around 150,000 people had been killed and that more than 40 percent of the population had become refugees or displaced persons (Nyheter, 2014). In September 2013, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees announced that violence in the country has created more than two million refugees, with a further 4.2 million people displaced inside Syria (UN Agency, 2013). The Western powers have avoided intervening in a desperate situation that appears can only be alleviated by a significant military effort with humanitarian goals. In early December 2013 the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights linked President Bashar al-Assad of Syria to war crimes and crimes against humanity for the first time, citing evidence collected by her panel of investigators over the course of the 33-month-old conflict in Syria (Cumming-Bruce, 2013). The Commissioner repeated her demand that the situation in Syria be referred to the International Criminal Court (ICC).

The top UN official in charge of coordinating the destruction of Syria's chemical weapons stockpile confirmed that the country's ability to produce those munitions had been rendered inoperable since a joint mission with the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) began work in October of 2013. However, the official, Sigrid Kaag, said at the organization's annual meeting of member-states in The Hague, “the most complex and challenging work still lies ahead,” referring to the safe disposal of the weapons. According to a UN Security Council (UNSC) resolution, they had to be destroyed by mid-2014 (Cumming-Bruce, 2013).

While the UN has become more engaged with the conflict in Syria, through its respective organizations, this has come at a glacial pace in a situation that has been ongoing since March 2011. Although the UN is the leading global authority for safeguarding international peace and security, numerous other international crises have at times portrayed the UN as unwilling or unable to safeguard the security of individuals across the world. Despite the basic principles of the UN Charter, interventions have often been flawed and absolutely unable to act to save lives. Although the UN can claim legality and legitimacy, as an intergovernmental organization, the organization has often, such as in Syria, acted too little and too late, with millions of people remaining in harm's way.

In the post-Cold War era, scholars have begun to acknowledge the escalating international challenge in addressing failing and failed states. These scholars have demonstrated how such states have failed in the core functions of statehood, resulting in domestic chaos and threatening international peace. At times, human security has been challenged due to neglect or deliberate disregard of the affected peoples’ safety (Rummel, 1994, pp. 2–15). Examples of failing states in a list dating back to the 1990s include: Chad, Darfur, the Democratic Republic of Congo, East Timor, Ethiopia, Kosovo, Libya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Uganda, and the former Yugoslavia, among others. All of these crises have triggered international, academic, and political attention on the obligation and legitimacy of the international community to protect human rights with or without a UNSC mandate (Janzekovic and Silander, 2013, pp. 20–27).

Scholarly studies have identified only weak consistency in UN interventions, although the UN Charter sets out conditions for UN interventions in the name of international peace and security, the response has been selective. While Rwanda and Darfur were crises that led to accusations of the international community doing too little, too late; the intervention in Kosovo and perhaps also Libya met with criticism on actions that were taken to be too much, too fast. With the increasing number of crises and UN operations, the operations have also become increasingly complex, due to the nature of civil wars. Peacekeeping operations have developed into a mix of peacekeeping, peacemaking, and peace enforcement, thus providing severe pressure on the UN's ability and capacity to act. While the world may sit out another crisis while blaming the UN for not intervening and protecting human security, another possibility for the world community is to acknowledge the universality of human rights and the corresponding universal obligation to intercede in situations as desperate as that in Syria. In 2005, the UN World Summit formally acknowledged the principle of Responsibility to Protect (R2P). In paragraphs 138 and 139, its 2005 UN Outcome Document stressed the universal responsibilities of states and international organizations to promote and protect human security. Over the last several years, R2P has arguably become an important international principle. Based on the previous atrocities in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, the UNSC decided to apply R2P for the first time in Darfur and explicitly thereafter in Libya.

R2P addresses third-party actions to prevent violent behavior, prevent the escalation of ongoing violence, and prevent violence from re-emerging. The international principle of R2P also addresses how an absolute notion of state sovereignty conflicts with an obligation to safeguard citizens. If this obligation is not met by the state, there is a legitimate justification for humanitarian intervention to protect human security and prevent the escalation of human security abuses. Ignoring human security is therefore not an option; the UN Charter and R2P, with numerous conventions, treaties and protocols, address the legal and legitimate obligations of the international community to act. Though there does not yet exist an affirmative duty to implement the R2P doctrine (Rose, 2014), it can serve as a responsive principle for how the international community could act to protect human rights.

This book seeks to understand the obligation of the international community, through international organizations (IOs), to protect the inhabitants in these situations. The overall question for this book is: What formal responsibility and actual capability do international organizations have to protect and prevent civilians from systematic mass atrocities? The responsibility of these organizations to engage in the implementation of R2P is discussed in the next section of this chapter. It discusses the responsibilities and capabilities these organizations have in implementing the R2P principle, in partnership with each other and/or the UN.

The above question will be developed in the international context of the developing civil war in Syria, in which more than 150,000 people have been killed, millions have become refugees or displaced persons, millions are starving and a generation of children and young adults have been deprived their basic right to physical and psychological well-being. While the UN has not been fully engaged in Syria, the systematic human rights abuses in Syria have engendered greater attention to the abilities and capabilities of other IOs. If the UNSC's inactions result in breaches of the UN Charter, there should not only be a discussion on how the UN must alter its approach and how powerful member-states of the UNSC must be held accountable, but also an examination of whether there are alternative paths for other IOs to take in the name of international peace and human security.

International Organizations and R2P

The obligations of international organizations in the responsibility-to-protect paradigm are the focus of this book. An understanding is sought of the structure of these organizations, their authority and the roles they can and do play in situations involving failing or overreaching states that lead to massive humanitarian crises. In 2001, a report by the International Commission on Intervention and States Sovereignty (ICISS) triggered an international debate on human and state security. It set out the responsibility of the international community when state authorities fail or are unwilling to safeguard their people from mass atrocities (ICISS, 2001). The report argued for the protection of basic human security and the intervention by the international community when states fail to protect their own people. The report defined the international community as consisting of sovereign states but also included international, regional, and non-governmental organizations (ICISS, 2001, ¶¶3.6, 6.31).

One often overlooked dimension of this report was the responsibility of IOs to be engaged in the implementation of R2P and how these organizations could be crucial for turning a principle into action in international politics. In the 2005 UN General Assembly's (UNGA) World Summit Outcome Document, one section linked the notion of R2P to regional organizations and referred to Chapter VIII of the UN Charter, to further emphasize the importance of regional organizations on R2P. For example, paragraph 139 linked the UN implementation of R2P to other partners by emphasizing “relevant regional organizations” (UNGA, 2005, ¶¶138–139) as potential partners that might assist in the collective action needed to implement UNSC measures endorsing R2P.

Since the formation of the UN in 1945, this organization has shared its responsibility for providing peace and security with regional entities. Chapter VIII of the UN Charter directly addresses the following:

[N]othing in the present Charter precludes the existence of regional arrangements or agencies for dealing with such matters relating to the maintenance of international peace and security as are appropriate for regional action provided that such arrangements or agencies and their activities are consistent with Purposes and Principles of the United Nations.

(UN Charter, Article 52)

Article 52 of the UN Charter continues and emphasizes the responsibility of regional entities to assist the UN and for them to “make every effort to achieve pacific settlement of local disputes through such regional arrangements or by such regional agencies before referring them to the UNSC.” It is important to acknowledge the word before in this sentence, as it implies an acceptance of the independent authority for regional organizations to protect and prevent the escalation of violence. Although the UN Charter explicitly sets out these responsibilities, it was first in a post-Cold War context that regional responsibilities to assist the UN were again highlighted in the security debate. The former UN Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, addressed in 1992 the importance of burden-sharing to assist the UN in its activities to promote peace (Boutros-Ghali, 1992). The idea of a “regional–global security partnership” (United Nations Security Council, 2007) was further discussed as post-Cold War crises emerged, such as that in Kosovo in 1999, in Darfur in 2006, in the Republic of Congo in 2008, and in Libya in 2010, and which engaged regional organizations, such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the African Union (AU) and the European Union (EU).

The systematic atrocities taking place in these and other situations have triggered a debate on how to share responsibilities to prevent such future crises and, if necessary, how to conduct interventions, legal in their methods and legitimate in their goals, to protect civilians in harm's way. While the more authoritative UN Outcome Document stressed the importance of UN authority behind all regional actions in the name of R2P, the ICISS Report emphasized the many problems embedded in the UNSC structures and the UN's periodic inability to act according to the objectives set out in the UN Charter. Therefore, the ICISS Report would allow for the opportunity for regional engagement to implement R2P when the UN fails to deliver assistance according to the Charter and it would also enable regional actions to be endorsed ex post facto by the UNSC. However, the regional–global security partnership has come under scrutiny regarding the issue of burden-sharing (ICISS, 2001, ¶6.35). While current practice continues to be framed by the UN and its ultimate authority to legalize and legitimize international actions in international politics, the ICISS Report stressed the importance of regional organizations acting when the UNSC fails to deliver on R2P challenges (i.e., when mass atrocities are foreseen, are happening, or have occurred) (ICISS, 2001).

However, the UN Outcome Document and the ICISS Report would agree on the long-term process that contextualizes R2P. In both documents, the R2P principle is about both protection and prevention. In other words, acting in the name of R2P implies assisting societies that are under stress before crises and conflicts break out and then safeguarding people from mass atrocities, limiting the scope of mass atrocities when they occur and rebuilding societies after atrocities have occurred. Although most R2P debates in international politics have focused on military interventions to halt ongoing mass atrocities, R2P is much broader in its scope, highlighting the responsibilities of the international community to prevent and protect civilians from human-security abuses (UNGA, 2005, ¶138).

The UN Outcome Document and the ICISS agree on a broadened understanding of R2P. R2P encompasses the prevention, the protection, and the rebuilding phases; or, as Gareth Evans has argued, R2P is about prevention, reaction, and reconstruction and any actions in the name of R2P are multifaceted, including political/diplomatic–, economic/social–, constitutional/legal– and security-related tools. While the preventative and rebuilding sta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The United Nations, international organizations and responsibility to protect
• 3 Contextualizing conflict: trends and challenges in the Syrian Civil War
• 4 International Criminal Court (ICC)
• 5 Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW)
• 6 Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC)
• 7 League of Arab States (LAS)
• 8 Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)
• 9 NATO
• 10 G8
• 11 Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE)
• 12 Summary
• Index