Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis article is part of a forum on the report of the United Nations Secretary-General, 'Implementing the Responsibility to Protect', which was released on 12 January 2009. The report was written as a response to 'one of the cardinal challenges of our time, as posed in paragraphs 138 and 139 of the 2005 World Summit Outcome: operationalizing the responsibility to protect'. The forum seeks to provide a range of perspectives on the report. It features contributions from Jennifer Welsh, Hugo Slim, David Chandler and Monica Serrano, and it concludes with a response from Special Advisor to the Secretary-General Edward Luck.

Resistance to the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) norm is often attributed to its association with military intervention and regime change. Political friction and contestation showcased at the recent United Nations General Assembly annual R2P debate point to broader problems for atrocity prevention at the UN.

This introduction to the special issue on Children and r2p lays out the parallel development of the r2p and Children and Armed Conflict agendas over the last two decades and surveys how key r2p documents developed during this period have engaged with issues of child protection. It then outlines the articles that follow.

Although the idea of r2p had been enshrined in the Constitutive Act of the African Union (au) shortly before the term was coined by the iciss, the au has been slow to live up to the commitment. Balancing r2p, on the one hand, with non-interference within the domaine reservé of the state, on the other hand, has proven an uphill battle. r2p sceptic member states have persistently opted for non-interference, and at most, a "non-indifference" approach representing a non-committal stance with regards to r2p. This paper offers reflections about the particular African construction of the third r2p "collective global" pillar, and explains the African reticence about the original iciss and 2005 World Summit Outcome versions of r2p. It expounds on the key reasons for this tempered reception and sheds light on the global governance security challenge as it plays out in the un-au politics of regional collaboration.

In this piece, Henderson looks to the shadow of Rwanda in terms of the concept of humanitarian intervention, and the evolution of the R2P doctrine. Tracing the re-examination of the conceptualisations of sovereignty and the principle of non-intervention that evolved after Rwanda, Henderson assesses the legal, normative, and institutional challenges that still attend the attainment of its goals. Henderson concludes on a note of cautious optimism: Although it is in no way a panacea, R2P – at the very least – raises the possibility that a greater range of measures may be taken in response to the commission, or anticipation of, atrocity crimes in the future. The legacy of Rwanda is the hope, reflected in R2P, that silence and idleness will never again be the international community's response to genocide.

The responsibility to protect was not the only concept that grew out of the world's failure to tackle the mass atrocities of the 1990s in Rwanda, Bosnia and elsewhere. So too did a new approach to humanitarian action which placed a higher priority on protecting civilians, and on advocacy to do so, than had hitherto been common. Oxfam's role in the campaign to persuade the 2005 World Summit to adopt the responsibility to protect was one prominent example, but, to different degrees, this broad approach has become widely shared among many international humanitarian agencies. Since 2005, however, even Oxfam has made little use of the responsibility to protect to frame its own work to help protect civilians, or to advocate to prevent mass atrocities in specific crises. This is partly because of the fear that R2P can be misapplied to justify military intervention where the benefits do not clearly outweigh the risks. But it is also because of the continuing suspicion around R2P among many governments. This seems to reflect the wider limits of what largely Western-based humanitarian agencies and governments can do to develop new international norms and put them into effect. When R2P was first developed, humanitarian agencies played a part in broadly similar alliances to ban landmines, establish the icc and so on. Some of these have already had a substantial effect, while it may be a generation before the value of R2P and others can be fairly evaluated. Looking ahead, humanitarian agencies will have to put an increasing emphasis on influencing emerging powers and other Southern governments, while alliances between governments and ngos, to be effective, will have to be genuinely global.