A Triumph for Decency at the U.N.

By Ian Williams, AlterNet. Posted September 19, 2005.

It was billed as the biggest gathering of heads of state and government ever, as most of the presidents, prime ministers and assorted potentates of the U.N.'s 191 members headed to New York for the 60th Anniversary Summit of the United Nations from Sept. 14-16.

Almost unnoticed in the coverage of the Summit was the most significant change in international law since the U.N. Charter itself -- the "Responsibility to Protect" declaration. Its survival is in some way a personal triumph for U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, certainly compared with the mostly anodyne mush that was left after "the spoilers," as he called them, had watered down many of the original bold concepts he presented in his reform package.

The "Responsibility to Protect" declaration, hammered out by 191 delegations late last Tuesday and formally approved Friday, overturns the hitherto "inviolable" principle of absolute national sovereignty in the case of massive human rights violations and genocide. The declaration incorporates into international law the doctrine of humanitarian intervention -- the idea that the world community has the right to intervene, including with military action, to prevent governments from committing massive crimes against their own citizens.

It comes too late to help the untold thousands who have already died in Darfur. But it is a millennial change, an answer to the question posed by Annan at the 2000 millennium summit: "If humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica -- to gross and systematic violations of human rights that affect every precept of our common humanity?"

The view taken by North Korea was that, "The new concept of 'humanitarian intervention' was a grave challenge to the supreme principle of respect for sovereignty in international relations. Humanitarian intervention would distort relations so that the strong wielded their power against the weak."

Few others were quite so explicit, even if the North Koreans were almost vindicated by the retrospective -- and spurious -- invocation of the principle by Tony Blair and George W. Bush to justify the invasion of Iraq. But this week in New York, China, Russia, Sudan, and even North Korea, signed on for the general principal.

The continuing tragedies in Darfur, Sierra Leone and Liberia had united much of Africa behind the concept. The President of the General Assembly, Jean Ping, who had fought a rearguard action against the assaults on the original document, drew the line against naysayers and implied a loss of African support on other issues if they tried to dilute the document further.

In its modern form, the doctrine of humanitarian intervention was invoked to cover American, British and French action to support the Kurds in the wake of the first Gulf War. When I asked U.N. lawyers at the time what the precedent was, they shuffled their feet nervously and eventually admitted that the clearest precedent was Adolf Hitler's invocation of it to justify intervention in Czechoslovakia, because of alleged maltreatment of the Sudeten Germans. Clearly this was not the one case to conjure with.

The lawyers assured me that the other examples that came to mind -- the Tanzanian invasion and removal of Idi Amin, or the Vietnamese route of the Khmer Rouge -- were in fact justified as acts of self-defense against border incursions.

Even after the Kurdish example, in the Balkan wars, one of the reasons that Germany rushed to recognize the former Yugoslav republic's independence was to make the conflict international, since the concept of humanitarian intervention in internal affairs was not generally accepted. International forces were invited in by officially recognized members of the United Nations.

Rwanda tested the question even further; the genocidal regime actually sat on the Security Council 1994 -- the very time it was conducting massacres. The intervention in Haiti later that year pulled it further. It was difficult to construe Haitian refugees landing on the beaches of Florida, a swing state, as a threat to international peace and security, whatever their effects on Bill Clinton's political prospects. But it also helped that the legally elected government of Haiti, in the form of President Aristide, wanted the intervention.

Ian Williams writes on the United Nations for AlterNet. His books include The U.N. for Beginners (1995) and Rum: A Social and Sociable History of the Real Spirit of 1776 (2005).