But now let's start with our speaker this week. I am happy to have our speaker join me here.
She has been a diplomat for the last six years and she's also an international lawyer.
This segment of today is also run in conjunction with the Oxford Institute of Ethics, Law and Conflict.
And this is where her background fits in as well.
As I said, she's a lawyer in the International Institutions and Security Policy Team of the Legal Directorate of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
And during her career at the FCO, she has moved between legal and policy roles,
and she's recently just returned from spending three years at the UK mission to the United Nations and in New York.
And there she was working. She was heading the UN Peacekeeping, Conflict Prevention and Human Rights.
She's also teaching at the Diplomatic Academy.
So she has kind of a background which combines academia with policy and legal issues.
And today she's going to speak about the responsibility to protect on its 10th anniversary point of collapse or resurgence place.
And thank you so much for that very kind introduction.
It's an absolute honour to be here today and I'm very grateful for the invitation.
I studied at Keble as an undergrad, so I've got many happy memories which pave the streets as well as some unpleasant ones at various crises and say,
I just want to make clear before I begin that I'm not speaking today in my professional capacity.
I'm speaking purely in a personal capacity.
And my comments should be attributed to or understood as representing the policy positions or otherwise of HMG.
So that very legal disclaimer and the topic that I'm going to speak about today is the responsibility to protect.
And specifically, I'm going to pose and then seek to answer the question of whether on its 10th anniversary OTP,
as it's commonly known, is at the point of collapse or resurgence.
I think it's significant that this year marks not only ten years since Atp's formal conception and unanimous endorsement by U.N. member states,
but it's also 70 years since the United Nations itself was founded to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.
There's not only real symbolism in these overlapping anniversaries,
but I think there's also a political impact to call significance due to the entwined goals,
challenges and trajectories of the UN as an international organisation and the
doctrine of ATP operating or trying to operate and function well within it.
A critical shared challenge that they have is the somewhat messy business of trying to translate
their noble aspirations into political will and real world action in order to save lives.
So in the course of this lecture, I'm going to try and explore how ATP has transitioned from an intellectual concept and steps out of the
pages of the 2005 outcome documents and began interacting with and colliding with UN diplomats of the
UN protection agendas and the geopolitical interests of the permanent five members of the Security
Council who are ultimately responsible as a default position for enforcing the responsibility to protect.
Now broadly, I'm going to divide my walk into three parts.
Firstly, I'm going to try and set out in general terms what the responsibility to protect is, where it came from, and what its nature is.
Secondly, assessed against these aspirations, I'm going to assess some of its successes and failures.
Thirdly, I'm going to situate OCP in its rightful context in the broader U.N. and international system and in the round.
Seek to answer my question of whether it is indeed now at the point of collapse or resurgence.
So what is the responsibility to protect and where did it come from?
Well, there's a long and short version of this. The short version is that OCP emerged directly as a result of the abject failure of the
international community to stop the genocide in Rwanda and Srebrenica in the 1990s.
In Rwanda, it's estimated that around 800,000 people died over the course of 100 days.
The U.N. Security Council to this day. And indeed, last year when I was still there, still recalls these most stains on its record.
And this led to the secretary general of the time, Kofi Annan,
calling for the need for a new international response to massive intrastate human rights violations.
So in response to this call, the Canadian government established an International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, ICRC.
This is co-chaired by Gareth Evans, the former Australian foreign minister, sometimes known as the intellectual father of RTP.
Now essentially what this report entitled and the report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty did was to
try and make palatable to states who are deeply suspicious of humanitarian intervention or indeed any interference with state sovereignty,
and to try and re-imagine intervention or reconceptualize it.
So it wasn't the scary sounding intervention, but rather something of a moral responsibility to act.
So the U.N. version of responsibility to protect directly borrowed this term of responsibility.
And the concept is built around this moral foundation.
The formal birth of the U.N. concept of OTP was in 2005,
when it was unanimously agreed and endorsed by all U.N. member states in the UN World
Summit Outcome Document and adopted by consensus in a General Assembly resolution.
Essentially, this marked Atp's emergence from a concept largely owned by the academic intellectual
community into the high level political arena and diplomatic discourse.
So focusing on what ATP is, essentially, it's composed of three pillars.
Pillar one is the concept that each state has a responsibility to protect its own populations from for RTP crimes,
namely genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing.
The second pillar of RTP P in tells the nation that the international community should assist states in discharging their responsibility.
It's essentially a capacity building pillar.
The third pillar of RTP and the most controversial given that it can entail in the last resort military intervention,
suggests that the international community, through the United Nations,
has the responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic,
humanitarian and other means in accordance with the UN Charter to help protect populations from these mass atrocity crimes.
Should the State immediately responsible manifestly fail in its responsibility to discharge this obligation?
Now I think it's useful to reflect on the exact wording of RTP and the World Summit document in trying to assess what Atp's exact nature is.
This has been the cause of much debate. The parameters of this debate as to what sort of beast is RTP sort of go along a sliding
normative scale with one end people suggesting perhaps the responsibility to protect
or certainly its its third pillar consists of a legal obligation for the Security Council
to intervene should the primary state responsible fail to protect its population.
So we have a legal obligation or potentially evolving legal norm at one end, at the other end.
OTP has somewhat rudely been dismissed as a mere gimmick or a slogan having no normative impact at all.
I've got two main reflections about this approach. Firstly, the responsibility to protect in terms of its third pillar.
It's not a legal obligation, and I'm not actually sure that its value lies in its emerging as such.
The responsibility to protect didn't change the law.
The first pillar reflects existing legal obligations that states owe their populations under international human rights law.
International humanitarian law. International criminal law.
No one was suggesting before OTP was coined that states could perpetrate mass atrocities or fail to respect the human rights of their own populations.
Also, I think it's good and important to note that RTP didn't address unilateral military humanitarian intervention.
It only conceived of potential military action through the existing United Nations Security Council.
It wasn't an absence of law which prevented the Council from taking action to stop the genocide in Rwanda or Srebrenica.
It had well-established power, legal powers, which it could hope to use under Chapter seven of the UN Charter.
My second reflection, and it might be a bit controversial for me as an international lawyer to see this and
is I think all watchers obsess a little bit too much about its exact normative status.
Is they this is somehow the key to its success in getting relevant decision makers to act.
I think these people and they proceed on the assumption that if something is considered law,
it's more likely to be complied with or if there is a permissive basis for legal action, then that will happen.
But we've seen from the case of Rwanda and Srebrenica, there were legal powers to act, but they weren't they weren't used.
And likewise, I think we can contrast Kosovo, where a number of states in the international community,
including those who participated in the intervention in Kosovo,
they actually didn't think that they had a legal basis for action, but they did have a moral pull.
And indeed, the Kosovo commission, which looked at the legal basis or otherwise for action after the events reached the conclusion,
which is not the UK official position, and that the action in Kosovo was not lawful but it was legitimate.
And I think that's a really interesting theme in the sphere of international law and international relations.
There's tension between that law and legitimacy and that overlap.
So my conclusion here is that I don't think we need to fuss about atp's an exact normative nature.
And particularly we don't need to focus in on whether it's changing the law.
I don't think it is. Rather, I think what OTP was designed to do, or the best thing it has to offer us,
was to provide additional moral and political impetus for the Security Council to use the legal powers it already has to take action.
So in short, I see Ottps body flying more as a global governance or international legitimacy movement.
And having worked at the UN, I can tell you that diplomats in the States,
they do care about whether their positions are perceived as legitimate or not.
The UN is a forum in which issues are debated and contested in terms of their legitimacy or otherwise.
So I think the final brief question is the pragmatic policymaker.
Diplomats warn of does it matter what kind of beast RTP is?
And as I've said, I actually don't think it always necessarily does,
so long as it generates that necessary sense that something must be done and something is ultimately done to stop mass atrocity crimes,
and that the intervention is loyal to the objectives, its intent as it is intended to serve.
So in addressing the question of Atp's nature, I've already partially answered the question of what OCP was designed to achieve.
And I think the best answer is that it's a global governance, international legitimacy norm,
which is meant to exert influence on relevant decision makers to act.
But it would be remiss of me not to point out that some OCP advocates have far higher expectations of RTP.
I mentioned just two criteria.
I think some OCP advocates hoped that RTP would actually influence policy prescriptions of how the council should act when confronted with RTP cases.
And secondly, that this would lead to consistent, concrete action by the political base that is the U.N. Security Council.
In my view, the most wildly divergent views about what responsibility to protect life trajectory.
This question of whether it's at the point of collapse,
failure or somewhere in between arises because of these very different starting points and expectations.
So meeting now it's a part two of my lecture having regard to these different goals for RTP.
I'm going to see where it lies on the trajectory of potential collapse or resurgence.
Let's reflect first on its achievements. I think that readily we can identify two key achievements of OCP as a global governance loom.
Firstly, from 2005 to 2015, states are broadly maintained, at least at a formal consensus,
through their verbal commitment to the responsibility to protect,
including states in the Global North and the Global South,
where the Global South was far more suspicious of OCP as a concept and worry that it would be used as a fig leaf for imperial intervention.
OCP would be masquerading as something it was not, and since 2006,
OCP has been referenced and in some form reaffirmed in over 25 U.N. Security Council resolutions,
six presidential statements, as well as General Assembly resolutions.
So on that level, it's quite hard to see that Ottps at the point of collapse if states and diplomats keep referencing it in these council and attacks.
Secondly, in terms of what it's achieved. OCP has become firmly institutionalised within the United Nations system.
Its normative framework is actually generated a physical one for international decision making.
Jennifer Welsh, the Secretary General Special Advisor on OCP, very much exists.
I watched on YouTube the other day and this is not on the point of collapse in any sense.
And indeed, responsibility to protect has spawned an entire industry of OCP, NGOs, state focal points and even a group of friends.
There are also few general annual reports on how to operationalise,
responsibility to protect and interactive dialogues with states expressing their views on an annual basis.
So essentially, I think this extensive OCP activity demonstrates that OCP remains alive and
well as an active part of international political and diplomatic discourse.
But then Ottps naysayers may say, Well, that's all very well, but RTP is part of UN diplomatic discourse, the diplomatic talking shop.
But it actually led to any action. Has it saved any lives?
My argument is that from 2005.
Responsibility to protect its substance, whether formally labelled as OTP or not,
has at least been a factor in generating the political and moral momentum which has led to action in some OTP situations.
To take one example from Africa in 2006, OTP was specifically referenced and namechecked in the preamble paragraph of Resolution 1786,
which authorised the deployment of a UN peacekeeping force to Darfur.
Furthermore, the Council also referred to OTP in the round when it referred the situation in Darfur to the ICC.
So arguably OTP was part of the normative backdrop which was leading to an increased council focus on criminal accountability.
But the most often cited example about tips to test case for TP was that of Libya.
When the Security Council, in the face of atrocities committed and threatened to continue being committed by the Gadhafi regime.
Authorise a Chapter seven military intervention. The Libya intervention was heralded by RTP advocates at the time as the coming
of age of the previously intellectual concept of responsibility to protect.
In fact, Gareth Evans described it as a textbook case of the RTP informing the OttpN on working exactly as it was supposed to.
Frankly, with hindsight, the staging of the Libyan intervention as an exercise of about P was possibly ill advised.
I don't think anyone would have known this. It was possibly, with hindsight, ill advised,
because the action in Libya became to be associated with allegations of unlawful
regime change effected under the cloak of OCP and Security Council Resolution 1973.
So in short, whilst Libya occurred and was cited as Atp's operational highpoint,
it then arguably led to its current operational low points and arguable collapse in Syria.
But before meeting one to examine the peace Libya legacy,
I think we should reflect a bit more on the resolution which was held up as being the first test case of OCP to examine whether it really was.
And it's notable that this Security Council resolution in the preamble paragraph, it acknowledged that an key crime may have been committed,
and it referred to Palawan, the responsibility of Libyan authorities to protect the Libyan population.
But what the resolution didn't say in the preamble,
which is the part where sometimes diplomats put things which can't be agreed as part of the operational part.
None of the resolution referred to the military intervention as an exercise of the Security Council's responsibility to protect the third pillar.
Instead, classic Chapter seven military authorisation language was used.
So was it a case of ACP or not having hypocritically engaged in that analysis?
And I do think that there's a risk of even obsessing about whether Libya was a true indication with cast of OTP at all.
After all, there is no authoritative decision maker who gets to judge whether it really was OTP or not.
I think maybe what's more interesting about this resolution is that it wasn't unanimously adopted.
And I think this still reflects some of the tensions operating between the global north and south.
Notably, it received ten positive votes in, five abstentions from Brazil, China, Germany, India and Russia.
I think it's also highly notable that Brazil, India, Germany are all seeking permanent seats on a reformed Security Council.
And I'm just going to leave that thought hanging there and pick it up later when I might
offer some reflections on this may mean for Atp's future or certainly its pointy edge,
the third pillar. So now moving on to our tips post Libya life trajectory.
There is a simplistic, superficial analysis which sees that essentially peace Libya.
The term ATP became so toxic in diplomatic U.N. circles that it essentially mocked R.I.P. RTP.
That was the end of it. And now I think we need to be really careful about that narrative,
because essentially it is one that certain states, including Russia, use to its advantage.
Arguably, Russia is using alleged prior abuse of RTP as a fig leaf to shield itself the Assad regime and its geopolitical decisions,
which mean that it has vetoed attempts to reach a solution in Syria.
And these intentions run entirely contrary to basic principles of mankind and its responsibility as a permanent member of the Security Council.
Furthermore, somewhat cynically, states professing to be wary of OTP and its abuse aren't above flipping the principle
on its head to justify spuriously blatant violations of international law.
When I was at the council seeking to negotiate a conflict prevention resolution in August 2014,
Russia actually welcomed and strengthened RTP language on conflict prevention and then
invoked OTP in Security Council debates as a basis for a legally annexing Crimea.
So at the same time as they were accusing others of abusing OTP and stating it was essentially dead,
they were cynically arguably abusing it themselves. So I think what we need to do is assess altarpiece atp's piece Libya fait from a
broader perspective and there is a clear counterweight to the whole tp IP narrative.
Essentially, we have seen the council being able to take action in some of TP situations post Libya.
One example is 2013, and following the new state of South Sudan's brutal descent into civil war,
the Security Council reinforced the existing peacekeeping mission and reprioritize its mandate towards the protection of civilians.
Also, in 2014, the Security Council, albeit not without delay,
mandated a UN peacekeeping mission in the Central African Republic to protect
civilians following the country's descent into ethnic and sectarian violence.
One commentator has even suggested that C.A.R. might even be a more pure form of RTP intervention, even if it wasn't badged as such.
And this is due to the serious lack of strategic interest to use council members.
So possibly, but for RTP and the acknowledgement of the moral stain and shame which flowed from
failure to intervene in previous places which were of strategic interest to the Council,
we can now see some sort of normative pool where the Security Council perhaps does feel morally obliged to intervene in some places,
which aren't of strategic interest to him, to them, rather.
Either way. So they have no impetus to block action.
But. But for moral or ethical concerns, they have to have no great strategic interest in intervening to try and address the mass atrocity situations.
So am I now going to proceed to you?
And the third part of my lecture, which is situating ATP and its life trajectory in the broader context of the international system.
I've got a few reflections. Firstly, I think that those that say ATP has no pull, it has no life left in it.
And underestimating the impact the ATP has had in actually delegitimizing the council itself,
I think it's helped delegitimize not just individual council blockages for action,
but it's also brought into even sharper focus, long standing questions about the council's current composition,
the continuation of the P5 veto power and council effectiveness.
It's given status within the Council and outside it a moral lexicon to attack and classify lack of council action,
which I think has played into this broader narrative and this big question that the UN itself faces on its 70th anniversary.
Secondly, I think it's interesting to note that ATP occupies a very similar space to other UN protection agendas.
There are a number of thematic agendas which occupy the same space at the Security Council,
for example protection of civilians, children, armed conflict, conflict prevention.
And many of these have the same physical structures, replicating the normative ones.
And I really think there's actually a risk of them all conceptually collapsing into each other.
Now, I'm raising the question as to whether that is problematic or not.
Arguably, the continued value of each of these thematic agendas, including ATP,
rests on them being well defined by way of illustration of how all these protection agendas are actually competing in the same space.
In December 2013 on MIS, the UK,
the UN rather peacekeeping mission in South Sudan opened its gates to shelter internally displaced
people at risk when ethnic conflict broke out between different tribes within the UN system.
Different thematic constituencies all claims that act as a fabric.
It was described as a case which demonstrated the productivity of rights up front.
A new council or UN agenda which occupies the same space as RTP.
Others said it was a key example of all others, that it was classic policy and in essence it was just the right and the humane thing to do.
So maybe it doesn't matter if there's conceptual collapse between all of these agendas,
but maybe it does because classification can also actually impact on resource flow where the money goes within the different UN system.
And arguably you want to direct it to the most effective.
But also, if you want practices such as that to become expected and generalised,
maybe you do need to know what to call it so that you can call for it and get other
constituencies to call for it so that political and moral momentum gathers to make it happen.
So my final point, which brings me back to the question at the beginning and the situating about deep within the broader UN system is
that I think ATP both encapsulates and also comes up against some of the key wider tensions existing at the UN,
its collective security system, international law and geopolitics and the interplay between all of these.
Now on its 70th anniversary.
As I say, the U.N. is coming under increasing scrutiny and pressure and front and centre of the broader debate as to
whether the U.N. is fit for purpose is whether the Security Council is failing in its primary responsibility,
and that is the U.N. charter language to maintain international peace and security.
And it's shameful, somewhat shameful at times.
Ineffectiveness in preventing and halting mass atrocity crimes is front and centre of this debate.
This is evidenced by the fact that there are three different initiatives going around
diplomatic and U.N. circles at the moment aimed at restraining the use of the veto.
In my view, this is a critical piece of evidence which shows that rather than being at the point of collapse,
I would say Ottps actually on a positive upward trajectory in these initiatives,
and there is a Frenchwoman as an apt one, as an issue from the Elders, which are aimed at constraining the veto.
Responsibility to Protect is specifically mentioned in to these documents.
So again, I would say that arguably this shows that the toxicity the brand of OCP had who's Libya is actually allaying somewhat.
And that potentially should these attempts at constraining the video gather momentum and translate into practice,
OCP will have more teeth than it actually did in 2005 when it was initially conceptualised.
So I think my conclusion is pretty clear in very blunt terms.
I would say happily that on its 10th anniversary, OTP is not at the point of collapse.
It is at the point of resurgence. But obviously the picture is somewhat more complex than this.
But in the round, I think it's shown itself to be a relatively robust and resilient, substantive norm,
even if it has suffered brain damage along the way and hit operational rock bottom in Syria.
But I think, as I said earlier, I think it's dangerous to blame RTP,
a doctrine for geo strategic decisions of the permanent members of the Security Council.
That is really to overstate what RTP was intended to do or what it could ever achieve.
I'll finish on a final note with one reflection, and that's there.
Whilst this lecture has focussed on the hard edge of responsibility to protect Pillar three,
I don't want in any way to be understood and to constitute me advocating for military
intervention as a political policy or legal solution in every complex case.
Indeed, a key component of the Gareth Evans report,
which is missing from the UN version of the ATP Doctrine, includes a concept of responsibility to rebuild.
Now I think the international community has learnt or indeed learns forget,
learns again that military intervention in and of itself can also be irresponsible if it is not properly,
properly situated in a broader political process with a coherent and responsible host intervention plan.
And while I don't think we necessarily need to amend the UN's Aatip concept to capture this, I really don't think it must be forgotten.
So that signifies the end of my lecture.
I would be very interested and in your views and to see whether you reach the same conclusions as me.
And I think. And that's going to facilitate that discussion.
Thank you very much. Thanks. I think it was fascinating talking about.