Where is the Responsibility to Protect?

Benedict Rogers, Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission, asks a difficult question

Zimbabwe, Sudan, Burma, North Korea – these are just four of the human rights and humanitarian disasters in the world today. And where is the United Nations, the organisation whose very Charter exists to promote and protect human rights and basic freedoms? What has happened to the Universal Declaration, that wonderful document signed by most countries in the world to declare that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”?

What has happened is that the world’s worst violators of human rights are now in control of many of the UN’s mechanisms for the protection of human rights. The lunatics have taken over the asylum. The institution created to promote freedom is hamstrung by those who most oppose freedom.

The problems of the UN are there for all to see. The new Human Rights Council – trumpeted as an improvement on the old Commission on Human Rights – is already showing signs of becoming corrupted and compromised. It includes countries such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and China – hardly champions of liberty. It is as if it were the Human Rights Abusers Council. To make the UN even more open to ridicule, Zimbabwe has recently been invited to chair a commission on economic development.

The “Special Rapporteurs” for country-specific and thematic mandates, such as Burma and North Korea, and issues such as religious freedom and torture, are reportedly under threat – there is speculation that their mandates may not be renewed. They are among the few remaining valuable aspects of the UN system – remove them, and what exactly would the UN do to help promote and defend human rights?

The UN is full of fine words – such as the “responsibility to protect” principle. Yet where is the responsibility to protect being exercised? Darfur? Zimbabwe? Burma?

A very mild Security Council resolution was proposed by the US and the UK earlier this year, requiring the illegal military regime that rules Burma to release all political prisoners, open up all parts of the country to international humanitarian organisations, and engage in dialogue with the democracy movement and ethnic nationalities. The resolution said nothing about sanctions, and it won the support of the majority of Security Council members – yet it was vetoed by China and Russia, and so it went nowhere. Even worse, South Africa – which should have known better – voted against it.

And yet, despite all its failings, the world needs the UN – or an equivalent that would do its job better. Isolationists who advocate simply pulling out of the UN are not helpful. The world would be even worse off without an international policeman to act, even if it is painfully late, in genocides and cases of gross human rights abuse. So how can we reform the UN – or find an alternative? That is what the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission will be investigating.

The Conservative Party Human Rights Commission, chaired by Stephen Crabb MP, was set up in 2005 by the Shadow Foreign Secretary to advise on international human rights issues and provide a campaigning voice within the party in Westminster and beyond for victims of human rights abuses. On Tuesday 22 May, we held a hearing on UN reform – with a line-up consisting of:

• former UK Ambassador to the UN Lord Hannay
• human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC who wrote Crimes Against Humanity
• Director of Human Rights Watch Tom Porteous
• journalist Joseph Loconte, a Senior Fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Centre in Washington, DC.

Last week, the Commission held a public meeting to hear analysis and policy ideas from these.

Former Archbishop of Cape Town Desmond Tutu has said: “I remember people saying about South Africa and apartheid that it is an internal affair how they deal with their own citizens. There are certain policies about which, yes, that is true, but there are other internal policies which are an affront to the world …. There are no frontiers in human rights. If a government treats its people as if they were rubbish, this cannot any longer be an internal affair.” If that is so, then we have to find international human rights mechanisms that work.