Edward Luck, special adviser to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, delivered a lecture titled “The Risk of Relevance: Libya, Cote d’Ivoire, and the Responsibility to Protect” to around 35 attendees in Robertson Hall on Thursday afternoon.
Luck elaborated on the "Responsibility to Protect" doctrine, a set of principles among the international community that asserts that international players have a responsibility to ensure states are protecting their populations from “genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing,” Luck explained.
Under this doctrine, he said, that outlines intervention techniques, the international community is expected to use “appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means” and potentially the “collective force” of the U.N. council to protect at-risk populations, with military force used only as a last resort.
The RtoP concept, though not a law, was first outlined by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty in response to genocides and ethnic cleansing, Luck said. It was finalized at the 2005 U.N. World Summit.
“RtoP is not a legal concept; it offers nothing new in terms of international law," he explained. "It is based on existing law relating to genocide and crimes against humanity.”
"We think that it is a powerful political concept ... because it can move publics, interest journalists ... parliaments ... and makes members of the Security Council reluctant to block humanitarian action,” Luck added.
Luck said that the U.N. invoked RtoP to justify its intervention in the current military situation in Libya. After speaking with worldwide experts, he determined that “something had to be done before there was a bloodbath,” he said.
Several organizations, including regional groups, the African Union and even the Human Rights Council, had already been before the Security Council calling for the U.N. to take strong action under RtoP before the decision was made, he added.
The last time RtoP was invoked was in 2005, when the Security Council launched a U.N. intervention in the Darfur genocide.
However, opponents have cited potential infringement on national sovereignty and questions about its use in practice as concerns about the RtoP, Luck said.
One criticism is that RtoP allows powerful, developed Western countries to intrude into, undermine and exploit developing nations, Luck explained. He also outlined an op-ed in The Washington Times by Kim Holmes of the Council on Foreign Relations, a piece which argued that RtoP violates U.S. authority by outsourcing its traditional use of force to an international body.
“It’s nice to be associated with a conspiracy,” Luck said, “but we actually don’t think it is meant to undermine sovereignty, to provide an excuse for intervention in a developing world or inhibit American sovereignty by dictating U.S. foreign policy.”
Luck also noted that nations have become increasingly supportive of RtoP and “have changed from a philosophy of non-interference to one of non-indifference” regarding crimes against humanity.
Luck added that changes to the original version of the doctrine have since clarified how RtoP can be used and how strong it can be, and that the 2001 principle was too all-inclusive and not feasible in practice. The 2005 version, he explained, limits intervention to four situations: genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing — a limited scope that makes the doctrine more practical.
“Our approach is narrow,” Luck said, “but deep.”
Allowing international intervention at earlier signs and stages of a crisis also was an improvement on the 2005 version, Luck said, explaining, “It’s not morally acceptable to base strategy on the assumption that there are thousands dead before you decide to do anything.”
Still, Luck said, there are difficult decisions that lie ahead in determining the appropriate uses of RtoP. Current crises in the Cote d’Ivoire, Sri Lanka, Yemen and Guinea are particularly pressing, he explained.
“We know that it needs a lot of perfection — every context is different,” Luck added. “However resources are lacking, though, you have to try. We would like to think that the tide of history is on our side.”
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