Responsibility to Protect

An introduction to the new international humanitarian doctrine: the Responsibility to Protect.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• R2P
• Responsibility to Protect
• humanitarian
• darfur
• genocide
• burma
• zimbabwe
• congo
• peacekeeping
• rwanda
• holocaust
• UN

[charbonelle]

Responding to critics of R2P in his book, "The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and For All", Gareth Evans, states "those who retain a strong aversion to imperialism, or perceived neo-imperialism" as erecting "straw men" by insisting on "hammer[ing] away at humanitarian intervention as the target, and only incidentally mention R2P...without acknowledging that the debate has moved on and the extent to which their concerns have already been conceptually accommodated."

[charbonelle]

Evans himself, as the president and CEO of the International Crisis Group (ICG), repeatedly cites ICG documents throughout his book. But when it comes to Haiti, there is not a single explicit reference to the situation in Haiti for the period covering 2004-2006 (despite the fact the ICG issued six Haiti-specific reports during the period).

[charbonelle]

Writing about the topic of economic sanctions in a section titled 'Operationalizing the Responsibility to Protect," Evans warns, without mentioning Haiti, that "the capacity of financial sanctions to do real damage...should never be underestimated."

Far from exceptional, Evans' evasion of R2P's destructive application in Haiti appears to be standard fare. One R2P advocate has noted, "The Canadian government's justification for the 2004 intervention in Haiti, has damaged the R2P campaign,.."

[charbonelle]

In his memoir, Paul Martin describes how the Prime Minister of Jamaica, P.J. Patterson, "saw the responsibility to protect in the context of the recent ouster of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti." Ever the expert at "personal diplomacy," Martin was able to "persuade him to change his view, partly because of Canada's bona fides in the region and in particular with respect to Haiti, as well as by arguing that no intervention would occur without regional approval."

[charbonelle]

The example of Haiti alone, combined with the R2P Lobby's silence on the Haiti case and its close proximity to other interventionist projects, should compel those who are concerned with the erosion of state sovereignty, the [re-]emergence of a paradigm of "humanitarian imperialism," and a continuation of the global counterinsurgency campaign (aka 'war on terror'), to think twice about supporting R2P's entrenchment as a global norm.

[charbonelle]

As an emerging lobby advocates for the institutionalization of a controversial doctrine of "humanitarian imperialism,"1 and a new administration that is friendly to this doctrine gets set to occupy the White House, a reminder of the case of HAITI points to the potential dangers posed by an "operationalized" Responsibility to Protect (R2P) norm.

[ageecws]

This is really important stuff - something worth getting behind.