As I watched the tragedy of the flooding in the Irrawaddy data unfold and here the rhetoric on all sides for and against more robust action, it came home to me just how difficult, and how essential it is to understand and practice the core values of humanity and impartiality.... Bernard Kouchner, Frances new(ish) foreign minister sounded good, and made France sound good, when he invoked the right to protection and suggested the time was right for some form of armed intervention to provide relief to the people of the delta. But as Gareth Evans., one of the architects of the Right to Protection doctrine has said. “The point about "the responsibility to protect" as it was originally conceived, and eventually embraced at the world summit … is that it is not about human security generally, or protecting people from the impact of natural disasters, or the ravages of HIV-Aids or anything of that kind. Rather [it] is about protecting vulnerable populations from "genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity."Read the full post on the Tufts blog.
In other words by invoking the R2P doctrine Kouchner devalues its usefulness in those extreme situations for which is was designed.... We are back to that age old humanitarian dilemma, whether to seek the course most likely to alleviate suffering in the here and now, or to address root causes and seek political change in the hope of potentially alleviating a lot more suffering in the long run. This may be the stuff of foreign policy strategy, but it is so patently not the stuff of humanitarianism. We, the outsiders, simply do not have the moral right to trade off assistance now to save lives against possible longer term good.
Monday, June 9, 2008
TUFTS blog: Peter Walker on the Right to Protect
Short term life saving or long term change?
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While I fully agree that "trading off assistance now to save lives against possible longer term good" is immoral from a humanitarian point of view (there are numerous examples of such a dilemma elsewhere), I do not think that this is exactly what is at stake when invoking the possible use of R2P in the context of Burma. Indeed, Gareth Evans does not dismiss the possibility to invoke “a crime against humanity” in this context, although this seems quite an unlikely scenario. And if there were a political will internationally, no doubt that governments would find a legal justification for whatever course of action they choose. The real question is not a legal one. It is purely practical: are the potential benefits of a military intervention (as suggested by the French Foreign Minister) likely to outweigh the inevitable costs in terms of human lives? This is where the real trade off lies. And this leaves us with a bigger question: it is not so much whether R2P will be devaluated if not used in the “right” context, but whether R2P is likely to be used at all.
ReplyDeleteCharles-Antoine