United Nations Right-To-Protect Reforms May Be Held Hostage By Security Council

Calling for the "responsibility of the international community to protect" civilians caught up in warfare, and, as a last resort, to use military force to do so, the heralded report essentially puts the protection of citizens first, and, by extension, ultimately limits the international use of force. It also advances the idea that the obligation is owed by sovereign states to its citizens -- a concept widely seen as the very foundation of the UN. A key aspect of R2P is the element of "shared responsibility": the idea that when sovereign states are unwilling or unable to protect the lives of their citizens, that the broader community of states must bear the responsibility. "If [R2P] is adopted at the [UN] Summit, it could mean warp speed in diplomatic terms," says former ambassador and permanent representative of Canada to the United Nations, Paul Heinbecker, who was at the 74th Annual Couchiching Conference in Orillia, Ontario earlier this month. The event is where leading Canadian and international experts from various fields discuss central policy challenges. Currently director of the political think-tank, the Laurier Centre for Global Relations, Governance and Policy, Mr. Heinbecker handed the Canadian-commissioned R2P report to the UN Secretary General five years ago. "Of course, immediate action would be preferable from a Canadian point of view, but these crucial ideas have come a long way in a short time and will now be part of the UN's discourse," he says. Still, for all its efforts, the report overlooks the very heart of the challenge. What makes R2P not only inconsequential at the 2005 UN Summit, but also makes the UN essentially undemocratic and ineffective as a body, is the very priviledged status of the Security Council's permanent members, a long-overdue element of discourse raised by Couchiching's opening speaker, General Lewis Mackenzie, last weekend. The very power to veto any Security Council decision both challenges any "responsibility to protect" and fundamentally undermines the United Nations' raison d'etre. Historically, the UN's attempts to intervene against the use of force have been blocked by the Security Council. The UN was prevented, for example, from making an effective response in Rwanda, where it might have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, due to the permanent Security Council members' veto. The UN role in Bosnia was kept passive, culminating in the 1995 Serbian massacre of thousands of Muslim men and boys in the supposed UN "safe haven" of Srebrenica. In the end it became too much for the conscience of the world to bear, giving rise to a role for NATO that finally rescued the Albanian Kosovars from Serbian ethnic cleansing. Mr. Heinbecker admits that veto power and its sometimes arbitrary use is "a fundamental problem we all face. Washington is deciding itself to use force, and that undermines the whole international legal system," he says. "The United States exercises veto regularly on behalf of Israel [...] Had there been no veto, the UN would have authorized intervention on Kosovo without a question," he says. "On Iraq, had there been no veto, the UN would not have authorized, in all probability, a war." In his speech at the conference, Mr. Heinbecker insists "Force should never be used abroad to advance an extraneous bilateral interest...[decisions to use force] cannot be subcontracted to others, not to the UN Security Council, not to the NATO Council, not to a coalition of the willing, and not even to our closest ally, the United States," maintaining that such decisions should be based, rather, on "Canadian values and Canadian decisions." He admits that blockages at the Security Council are almost inevitable and raised the possibility that the power of veto-wielding states could be expressed in other forms even if the veto was abolished. "At the end of the day, what do you do if the Security Council is paralyzed?" says Mr. Heinbecker, "In my opinion, what you do is you say, 'were there no veto, what would the outcome be?'" In an interview following his speech, Mr. Heinbecker calls for a more strongly independent stance on Canada's position on the use of force: "At the end of the day, what do you do if the Security Council is paralyzed?" says Mr. Heinbecker. "In my opinion, what you do is you say, 'were there no veto, what would the outcome be?'" "If you walk up to [boxer] Evander Holyfield, you're not going to push him around," says Mr. Heinbecker, laughing. "But on the other hand, what you try to do is work toward a system in which power is used in conformity of international laws and norms, and that's where diplomacy comes in. That's what we're trying to do." http://www.embassymag.ca/html/index.php?display=story&full_path=/2005/august/17/r2p/

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