HUMAN SECURITY: FROM HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION
TO RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT
Aurora Martin*
Abstract: The topic of interest in the present work is the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). I chose this theme by trying to define the concept and to offer a theoretical and comparative approach, making the correlation with the Humanitarian Intervention, in the framework of Human Security. In this respect, R2P becomes an important milestone in understanding sovereignty, intervention, and human rights. The doctrine addresses the responsibilities an individual state has to protect its populations from genocide, war and crimes against humanity, and also concerns the responsibility the international community has to intervene – even militarily – when a state neglects its duty. My goal is to consider the origins and likely trajectory of R2P, within the Human Security framework, from the narrow view, focusing on issues of human rights and the persecution of civilians during armed conflict, and the broad notion, maintaining the individual’s protection during natural disasters.
- Human Security (HS) – Theoretical Background
- HS 1.0. Humanitarian Intervention (HI)
- HS 2.0 – Responsibility to Protect (R2P)
Key words: Human Security, Responsibility to Protect (R2P), Humanitarian Intervention, Sovereignty, Human Rights
HUMAN SECURITY – THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
The new threats in today’s world have generated a shift from the militaristic approaches, which dominated during the Cold War[1] (a traditional view of security, focused on using the military to ensure the territorial integrity of sovereign states), to a more expanded framework. In this context, the concept of human security (HS) appeared in the 1980’s as a counterpoint to the idea of state security. However, HS did not emerge until the 1990’s as a systematized concept, when it began to develop institutionally. The maturation process has taken nearly twenty years; yet, the world still finds that HS implementation is difficult and fraught with problems.
An early document in 1992, Agenda for Peace, proposed by Boutros Boutros Ghali, introduced the dichotomy of individual security versus state security. Subsequently, the HS concept was recognized internationally in 1994 when the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) constructed its Human Development Report, the core idea delineating human insecurity as vulnerability. From the 1994 Report – where HS was first articulated – to the establishment of the UN Commission on Human Security (2000) and its subsequent activities, the concept has not only become a buzzword within the UN, but it has also been intrinsically linked to the organization’s basic mission[2].
Other later contributions completed the HS framework – from Human Security Now report elaborated by the UN Commission of Human Security (2000) to the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty document, The Responsibility to Protect (2001), which basically promoted a new level in the development of human security.
A brief and clear outline of the HS framework is offered by Alexandra Amouyel[3], as a result of the mixture of the answers to four fundamental questions:
Human Security for whom? For individuals, both citizens and persons and, of course, for communities, because, as Kofi Annan underlined, “once synonymous with the defense of territory from external attack, the requirements of security today have come to embrace the protection of communities and individuals from internal violence”[4].
Human Security from what? From threats to individual’s survival, safety and dignity.
The main threats to consider remain of military and physical nature, but HS could also embrace “far more than the absence of violent conflict”, encompassing “human rights, good governance, access to education and health care and ensuring that each individual has opportunities and choices to fulfill his or her potential”[5].
Human Security from whom? From state and national / transnational non-state actors[6].
Human Security by what means? By actors (trans-national network) and by policies, intervention, and in the very extreme case, when all other multilateral actions have failed, by acting to assist victimized populations.
Due to these considerations, within the human security paradigm the individual becomes the primary referent of security, broadening the focus from security of borders to the protection of individuals inside and across borders.
A distinction can be also made between two approaches in defining the area of human security. The first is a broad notion, which holds that human welfare is the best indicator of security: “It means, as United Nations Human Development Report mentioned in 1994: safety from such chronic threats as hunger, disease and repression as they kill far more people than war, genocide and terrorism combined.”[7] The narrow view of human security focuses on issues of human rights and the persecution of civilians during armed conflict. In a narrow sense, human security can be viewed as dealing with violent threats to individuals, such as civil war, genocide, terrorism, torture, weapons of mass destruction, violent crime, use of child soldiers, displacement of populations, ethnic cleansings, rape and so forth. The two approaches are complementary rather than contradictory. However, for both pragmatic and methodological reasons, the Human Security Report uses the narrow concept for the implementation of its mandate.
Moreover, in terms of actors there are two main contemporary approaches on human security: one of them emphasizes the primacy of the state with a broadened conceptualization of human security, while the other attempts to place grater emphasis on a network of multiple actors, including the UN, states, NGOs and the empowered individual.
HS 1.0 – HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION (HI)
The first attempt to make HS operational was based on the sudden revival of the concept of humanitarian intervention during the 1990s. This is what made me to refer to HI as HS version 1.0, in line with the current trends of “cybernetizing” the international relations language.
However, the modern concept of “humanitarian intervention” is not quite brand new, its essential ideas dating back, at least, to the Spanish legal thinking of the early 17th century. Shortly thereafter, Alberico Gentili[8] and Hugo Grotius[9] provided a framework European state system that time. Thus, beginning with the seventeenth century, jurists considered that humanitarian considerations were included in justifying war and since then, it has never disappeared from international law and state practice.
Even though HI did boldly re-emerge at the end of the Cold War, the characteristics of the concept weren’t clearly defined, and politicians, soldiers and legal or political thinkers using the term with very different aims.
The first cases for practical application of the HI concept involved Somalia and Bosnia (1992), both events emphasizing the complexity of a collective intervention against a failed or failing state and the inability of the UN to stop the violence and effectively protect civilians. The intervention in Somalia failed in and unabated massacres took place in ex Yugoslavia, in Srebrenica, and in Rwanda.
The ineffectiveness of the UN provided the grounds for increasing permissiveness toward individual interventions by powerful states, or regional organizations, which were perceived as more effective. Examples of such interventions include NATO actions in Bosnia in 1995 and Kosovo in 1999 (despite the illegitimate nature of the latter), Australian intervention in East Timor, and British intervention in Sierra Leone in 2000.
Moreover, the 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo, undertaken without Security Council authorization, revived fears of the re-emergence of “imperial” / “colonial” dominance by world powers in their traditional spheres of influence and it became clear that the concept of HI has no future, at least as a simple concept or customary law.
Even though the HI “experiment” collected many detractors, it still had raised three fundamental issues in analyzing the intervention in the name of the human rights – its “antitheticity” to the principle of sovereignty, the authorization for the use of force and the operational issues associated to its implementation (motivation, means and ends).
The principles of refraining from the threat or use of force against states, other than in self-defense or when authorized by the Security Council, and of nonintervention in matters that are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state are enshrined in the UN Charter. Moreover, nonintervention also acts to strengthen the rule of law, and to create the international environment for the realization of the ideals of the UN Charter. On the other hand, the idea of intervention for the purpose of safeguarding one of the core “pieces” of the contemporary international law – individual human rights – is a landmark of human moral development and is also strengthening the system of international legal rules and norms.
In both cases there is room for dangers – the doctrine of nonintervention carries with it the perils of omission – atrocities protected by the barrier of state sovereignty – while humanitarian intervention carries with it the perils of commission – either that it is used as a cover for other motives, or that the intervention is well-intentioned but results in more harm than good[10].
The second issue, the legitimacy here rests on what is done, who does it, and under what authority. The experiences of the 1990s unveiled three types of bodies that have claimed the authority to intervene: the United Nations, particularly the U.N. Security Council; regional organizations, including the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), NATO, and the Organization of American States (OAS); ad hoc individual states / groups of states[11].
Even though the United Nations is the central institution to provide legal legitimacy, since the principle of nonintervention under international law is primarily enshrined through the provisions of the UN Charter, the dilemma can be summed up in the following three propositions: to respect sovereignty all the time is to be complicit in human rights violations some of the time; to insist that the Security Council must always consent is to hand over power to the most obstructionist of its members; and to use force unilaterally is to violate international law[12].
Since intra-state conflicts frequently present a mélange of security, political, economic, and humanitarian problems, all interconnected, the HI implementation was problematic. It is particularly hard to distinguish from undesirable types of intervention, taking into account the fact that, for example political tools, such as sanctions, and humanitarian tools, such as food aid, can undermine each other’s effectiveness.
In light of the previous criticisms, the HI concept did not reach the level of an international law norm and it also did not cover both notions of human security (a HI action in case of natural disaster, even in a case similar to the Burmese crisis from 2008[13], would not have done anything but undermining concept’s coherence). Nonetheless, the attempts to overcome HI’s inherent flaws gave birth to a new emerging norm – the responsibility to protect.
HS 2.0 – RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT (R2P)
The repetitive protection failure by the international community (in former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Sudan) on the one hand, and the fear of intervention without authorization (such as in Kosovo) on the other hand, led the then UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, to call for the elaboration and normalization of some basic principles that would balance at the effective prevention of future atrocities against civilians at the same time in keeping with the respect for international principles of sovereignty and non-intervention in the domestic affairs of other states.
In response to the U.N. Secretary-General’s call, an independent International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) was founded and, in 2001, it issued the report that created the ground for R2P development.
The main goal of the ICISS report was to replace the compromised idea of HI by shifting the debate away from the legal right to intervene to the victims of a humanitarian crisis, and implicitly from “sovereignty as control” to “sovereignty as responsibility”[14]. Also by shifting the debate toward the victims of a humanitarian crisis, R2P envisages a larger purpose than that of a military intervention becoming strongly connected to the issues of human rights and development and thereby winning more legitimacy than HI. Thus, in our approach, R2P represents the 2.0 “version” of HS.
Along with the shift of the debate, there are other two main differences between HI and R2P, namely – while the scope of HI has never been clearly defined, the application of R2P is restricted to four crimes (genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity) and unlike HI, R2P was also officially endorsed within the UN documents (the basis of R2P were spelled out in the UN General Assembly’s 2005 World Summit Outcome and further on in the UNSC Resolution 1674 on the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict). However, initially R2P generated a “revolt” within the UN, due to its association with the humanitarian intervention. In this light, there are two important aspects to be taken into account – the reasons of associating R2P and HI and the “composition” / concerns of the group of states opposing R2P.
The first reason is external to R2P and stems from the tendency of many commentators and some prominent figures to misrepresent R2P as a way of “legalizing” humanitarian intervention. Although the World Summit Outcome Document specifically identified the Security Council as the source of authority for coercive R2P measures, Alicia Bannon argued that “the [2005 World] Summit agreement strengthens the legal justification for limited forms of unilateral and regional action – including military action – if the United Nations fails to act to protect populations from genocide and other atrocities”[15]. The following year, Stephen John Stedman, a senior advisor to Kofi Annan, argued that Annan’s agenda included “a new norm, the responsibility to protect, to legalize humanitarian intervention” and then claimed that the Summit had succeeded in establishing “a new norm to legalize humanitarian intervention”[16]. Thus, it is hard to see where the World Summit Outcome Document does anything other than reaffirm the Security Council’s primacy on use of force decision making, but commentaries such as this help reinforce the belief that R2P could be used as a “Trojan horse” by unilateral interventionist governments.
The second reason for the persistence of the association of R2P with humanitarian intervention is that the original ICISS report was indeed primarily concerned with re-conceptualizing humanitarian intervention in the wake of the Kosovo crisis. Charged with reconciling sovereignty and the need to halt genocide and mass atrocities, the ICISS introduced new language and concepts, but did not lose its emphasis on the problem of humanitarian intervention.
It is also important to distinguish between the two groups of states that expressed skepticism or outright opposition to R2P. For traditional opponents of R2P, such as Cuba, Pakistan, Algeria, Iran, Zimbabwe and Venezuela, the issue was one of forestalling any moves to improve the capacity of international institutions to interfere in the domestic affairs of states. These concerns are different from those raised by more influential states such as India, the Philippines, China, and Russia, where the skepticism did not necessarily translate into a rejection of the underlying purpose of R2P, which is the prevention and halting of genocide and mass atrocities. Therefore, for the latter states the problem is that it opens the door to potential abuse by states that might use R2P arguments to justify unilateral and self-interested interventions.
In the specialized literature, Alex Bellamy made some interesting comments on three understandings of R2P – concept, principle, norm[17] – implicitly associated with three levels of analysis – political, ethical and legal. The three facets of R2P are also charting its development from an abstract idea toward a legally binding rule of conduct.
As a concept, R2P represented just an abstract idea, a suggestion about a possible norm or course of action, a proposal requiring further development, elaboration or agreement before it can be turned into shared expectations of appropriate behavior or into a plan of action for institutional reform. This state can be associated with the incipient stage of R2P development – ICISS report.
As a principle, R2P embodies a fundamental truth or proposition which serves as the basis for belief leading to action. In its development from concept to principle, R2P has acquired a status of shared understanding and emphasized that there is sufficient consensus to allow it to function as a foundation for action. The importance of the difference between R2P as concept and R2P as a principle rests with the fact that, conceptually, it determines whether as a concept, it is subordinate to the traditional principles of sovereignty and non intervention, or whether as a principle, it has the effect of altering the meaning of sovereignty itself.
As a norm, R2P is best understood as a collective understanding of the proper behavior of actors[18]. In this case, the academic debate centered around the question whether R2P is a norm and, furthermore, whether it is an emergent or an embedded norm. The UN High-Level Panel endorsed R2P as an emerging norm that there is a responsibility to protect and confirmed the developing consensus that this norm was exercisable by the Security Council[19].
CONCLUSIONS
As mentioned in the introduction, the R2P represents an important milestone in our understanding of sovereignty, intervention, and human rights. Above all, its importance resides in offering the possibility to protect the human being of the worst forms of human barbarism (genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity).
The current world state of affairs does not allow an integral adoption of R2P principles, but the concept succeeded in obtaining a more significant adherence to it than the Humanitarian Intervention. Still, its development is in peril due to unexpected evolutions such as the Russian-Georgian war, which questioned the validity of the criteria used in assessing the grounds for intervention in a humanitarian crisis.
In summary, R2P is a radically unfinished program. However, by re-conceptualizing sovereignty as responsibility and situating intervention within a broader continuum of measures designed to protect individuals from genocide and mass atrocities, the UN succeeded in reframing the debate.
References:
Amouyel, Alexandra, „What is Human Security?” (2006), Revue de Sécurité Humaine / Human Security Journal – Issue 1 – April, pp. 10 – 23.
Bannon, Alicia L., (2006) „The Responsibility to Protect: The UN World Summit and the Question of Unilateralism”, The Yale Law Journal 115: 1156–1165.
“Humanitarian Intervention? How Can We Do It Better?” (2001), conference held at Wilton Park, Sussex, U.K., February 19-22.
Kofi Annan, (2000) « Secretary General Salutes International Workshop on Human Security in Mongolia ». Two day session in Ulaanbatar, May 8-10, in Harvard University list of definitions.
Stedman, Stephen J., UN Transformation in an Era of Soft Balancing, International Affairs 83(5): 933–944, 2007.
Tharoor, Shashi, Daws, Sam, (2001), „Humanitarian Intervention: Getting Past the Reefs”, World Policy Journal, Summer.
Bellamy, Alex, (2009), Responsibility to Protect, The Global Effort to End Mass Atrocities, Polity Press.
Legro, Josef, (1977), „Which norms matter? Revisiting the failure of the internationalism”, International Organization, 51(1), p. 33.
UN High Level Panel on Threats, (2004), Challenges and Change, “A more secure world: Our shared responsibility ”, A/59/565, 2 December, par. 203.
Online resources:
UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, Millennium Report, Chapter 3, pp. 43-44 in Harvard University list of definitions http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hpcr/events/hsworkshop/list_definitions.pdf;
United Nations Human Development Report, New York , Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994, http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/reports/255/hdr_1994_en_complete_nostats.pdf .
http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/0/9/8/0/9/p98097_index.html.
* Aurora Martin, Head of Unit, National Agency for Equal Opportunities, Ministry of Labour and Social Justice; European Center for Security Studies G.C. Marshall alumna.
[1] Security studies and security-based organizations have long been focused on foreign and defense policy mechanisms to avoid, prevent, and if need be win interstate military disputes (Baldwin 1995).
[2] http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/0/9/8/0/9/p98097_index.html.
[3]Alexandra Amouyel, What is Human Security? Revue de Sécurité Humaine / Human Security Journal – Issue 1 – April 2006, pp. 10 – 23.
[4] UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan. Millennium Report, Chapter 3, p. 43-44 in Harvard University list of definitions http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hpcr/events/hsworkshop/list_definitions.pdf.
[5] Kofi Annan. « Secretary General Salutes International Workshop on Human Security in Mongolia ». Two day session in Ulaanbaatar, May 8-10, 2000 in Harvard University list of definitions.
[6] I see the media and NGO’s as playing important roles as non-state actors, bringing the world’s attention to these tragedies and offering support and assistance in resolving them. In this respect, the CNN effect transforms simple people, watching comfortable TV news in own living room, witnessing the events; witnesses who are starting to ask themselves what they can do to decrease the terror and are wandering why their government doesn’t react in order to find a solution. This awareness of the simple people is the necessary step for an inverse of the typical response: the usually action – reaction becomes, in this specific situation, reaction (watching the events) – action (by militating against violence and injustice, individual or in civil societies and by asking the government to be more responsible).
[7] United Nations Human Development Report, New York , Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994, http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/reports/255/hdr_1994_en_complete_nostats.pdf .
[8] As early as 1598, Alberico Gentili established the “honorable reasons for waging war”. He recognized the importance of humanitarian considerations in war and concluded that “the subjects of others do not seem to me to be outside that kinship of nature and society formed by the whole world”. (De jure belli libri tres, 1598)
[9] Hugo Grotius, the seventeenth-century Dutch jurist, often credited as “the father of international law”, did not have a doctrine of humanitarian intervention in the contemporary sense. What he did have, however, was an ethical theory of intervention, which incorporated many of the concerns found in the modern literature. (The Rights of War and Peace, in three books, 1625)
[10] Shashi Tharoor, Sam Daws, „Humanitarian Intervention: Getting Past the Reefs”, World Policy Journal, Summer, 2001.
[11] Ibidem.
[12] “Humanitarian Intervention? How Can We Do It Better?” conference held at Wilton Park, Sussex, U.K., February 19-22, 2001.
[13] In May 2008, the ruling military regime of Burma/Myanmar initially refused in responding to offers of international aid following the catastrophic Cyclone Nargis with its tidal surge that devastated the Irrawaddy delta, directly killing over 130,000 people and putting scores of thousands more at risk from disease, starvation, and exposure.
[14] Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty – The Responsibility to Protect http://responsibilitytoprotect.org/ICISS%20Report.pdf
[15] Bannon, Alicia L., The Responsibility to Protect: The UN World Summit and the Question of Unilateralism, The Yale Law Journal 115: 1156–1165, 2006.
[16] Stephen J., Stedman, „UN Transformation in an Era of Soft Balancing”, International Affairs 83(5): pp. 933–944, 2007.
[17] Alex, Bellamy, Responsibility to Protect, The Global Effort to End Mass Atrocities, Polity Press, 2009, pp. 4 – 7.
[18] Josef Legro, Which norms matter? Revisiting the failure of the internationalism, International Organization, 51(1) 1997, p. 33.
[19] UN High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, “A more secure world: Our shared responsibility”, A/59/565, 2 December 2004, par. 203.
