The Concept Of "Sovereignty As Responsibility" Moves Up A Notch At The

Initial discussions seemed promising. The Responsibility to Protect was strongly supported in the report of the High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change and also a follow-up report by Annan, entitled "In Larger Freedom." The latter was the focus for debate by governments at the UN General Assembly this spring and summer. Those debates have led to successive "draft outcome documents" for the September Summit which have been more restrained in their commitment to R2P principles, a reflection of the divisions among member states. Incorporating R2P in the September reform package would oblige governments to sign on at the highest level to the idea that sovereign states have a responsibility to protect their own populations from crimes against humanity. But when they are unwilling or unable to do so, the broader international community must bear that responsibility. A majority of governments support this concept of "sovereignty as responsibility." Many early concerns about the inviolability of sovereignty and how R2P should be interpreted have been addressed to the satisfaction of skeptics. The African Group has begun to articulate its own unique perspective on the protection of civilians, emphasizing early warning, the moral imperative to stop genocide wherever it happens, and a continuum of responses from prevention to reaction and also post-conflict rebuilding. However, a vocal minority of states persist in opposing R2P, seeing it as an encroachment on traditional notions of state sovereignty and international law. While the most vocal opponents of R2P are members of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), including Pakistan, Venezuela, Cuba and Egypt, the NAM has been unable to issue a categorical rejection of R2P in the latest negotiations. Some NAM countries attempt to undermine support for R2P by urging the postponing of any agreement, calling for the General Assembly to take up the issue during its upcoming 60th session. The most recent draft outcome document includes a paragraph on the R2P principles, but also calls for further discussions. The text of the R2P paragraph uses the phrase 'responsibility to protect' with respect to states, but, when discussing actions to be taken by the international community when civilians are at risk, replaces 'responsibility to protect' with 'obligation to protect.' This weakens slightly the Responsibility to Protect as an emerging normative framework. R2P opponents at the UN (and elsewhere) have also raised difficult and salient questions about political will and the ability of states to exercise their responsibility to protect. By what criteria will the UN determine that a state is unable or unwilling to protect its citizens? Who will intervene in instances when the Security Council is deadlocked? The atrocities in the Darfur region of Sudan illustrate the difficulty of marshaling the political will to act even when civilians are clearly at risk. From the outset, Canada and other R2P advocates have pursued a "two-track" approach. The first seeks to solidify R2P as an emerging norm of international behaviour; the second and more difficult objective would provide guidance to the Security Council on when it should authorize the use of force. The most recent draft outcome document does little more than invite the Security Council to refrain from using the veto in cases of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. It also expresses support for implementation of the United Nations Action Plan to Prevent Genocide. Thus, while the current UN reform effort will in all likelihood lead to modest gains for the Responsibility to Protect as an emerging norm, decisive action in times of crisis will depend for the foreseeable future on the notoriously unreliable UN Security Council. -- Heather Sonner works at the World Federalist Movement in New York, and Fergus Watt works at the Canadian branch of the World Federalist Movement. http://www.embassymag.ca/html/index.php?display=story&full_path=/2005/august/17/responsibility/

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