We must improve our application of the Responsibility to Protect

Last week across Europe, 20 years on, the genocide in Srebrenica was remembered by those who cannot forget and many of those who looked away. Special events recalled the cold-blooded murder of the 8,372 Bosnian Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serbs, and the rape and abuse of the women and girls left behind. They had moved into a safe protected UN area but were delivered into the hands of those responsible and were powerless to escape or resist.

In Cambodia, Rwanda and Sudan the cry of ‘never again’ after the Holocaust must have seemed hollow. Our increasingly interdependent and informed global community failed to act despite the evidence and having the resources to do so.

So when the World Summit in September 2005 agreed to endorse the principles of Responsibility to Protect there was real hope the ‘never again’ might be for real this time. Leaders of states, led by Kofi Annan at the UN, had found a way to combine respect for sovereignty with the human demand for international action to prevent atrocities.

They agree a norm that would form the basis for humanitarian intervention in situations of armed conflict and protect their citizens ‘from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.’

The three pillars of R2P laid out the primary responsibility of states for protecting their own populations; the role of the international community to encourage and assist States in fulfilling this responsibility; and the duty of the international community to use diplomatic, humanitarian and, if necessary, interventionist means to protect populations from these internationally recognised crimes.

10 years later, how are we doing? Today in the House of Lords I look forward to a full debate on the way in which both the UK and the UN are implementing R2P. While interventions have saved lives in Kenya, Cote D’Ivoire, Sudan, Libya and elsewhere, those interventions have seen mixed outcomes in the years that follow. And UN Security Council vetoes have been used to block action to protect civilians from atrocities in other cases, most recently in Syria.

For me, the Responsibility to Protect principles remain the best and only way to handle these challenges internationally. But the application of the principles has a long way to go. Their application has to be consistent; early warnings cannot be ignored; capacity building must be more of a priority; and the future of the veto as a means of stopping action must be up for debate. For past failures, if we are to pay proper respect to those who paid with their lives, or the painful memories for those left behind, then we must review and improve how we put R2P into action in the future. The Mothers of Srebrenica and the survivors in Rwanda deserve no less.