Gareth evans when is it right to fight

Anyone interested in international affairs should read this book on what is certain to be a continuing debate. Our conscience demands that we react whenever people suffer, from Rwanda to Srebrenica, from Darfur to Gaza. Gareth Evans's volume could not be more timely or relevant. Gareth Evans's book will be vitally important in ensuring that R2P is understood and accepted. A terrific book which should be required reading for every foreign minister, and anyone else wanting a better and more peaceful world.

Our greatest failure is the inability to deal effectively with egregious human rights violations such as in Darfur. This authoritative work explains why the concept is so vital. It is both timely and needed. I hope it gets the readership in high places, not least in Africa, it deserves. To order, visit the Brookings Institution Press website.

Responding to Crises: When is it Right to Fight? That is reaching some kind of agreement on the specific criteria that should govern any decision, by the UN Security Council or anyone else, to use coercive military force.

Such criteria were spelled out in the Canadian Commission and later reports, but their adoption has been resisted in particular by the U. I suspect we will be having this argument for a long time yet. What about institutional challenges? What kinds of institutions are needed to protect civilians, and what gaps still exist?

On this some significant progress has been made recently with the establishment within the UN system, close to the Secretary-General, of a Joint Office of his Special Advisers on the Prevention of Genocide, and for the Responsibility to Protect, and their staffs; within the US National Security Council, next to the President, of a Director for War Crimes and Atrocities; within the Swiss Government of a small group of full-time officials performing this function; and within a number of other governments, including our own, the identification of specific officials with specific oversight responsibilities in this area.

Things are moving here, especially on the mediation resources front, but not fast enough. One area where dramatic advances have been made over the last decade and a half, with a separate dynamic of its own but in parallel with the development of the responsibility to protect, has been in establishing the machinery of international criminal justice, first with a series of ad hoc tribunals and courts for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Cambodia, and now with the permanent International Criminal Court ICC in The Hague.

A great deal of progress has been made in recent years in rethinking the kind of force configurations, training, military doctrine and rules of engagement on the ground that are consistent with civilian protection and atrocity response operations as distinct from traditional war-fighting.

But there is real distance yet to travel before we have in place, actually ready within national systems or regional organisations, the kind of rapid reaction capability that has long been talked about as necessary. That the threat of indictment and punishment would be a significant deterrent to wrongful behaviour occurring has always been a significant part of the rationale for developing a proper international criminal justice system just as it has always been with domestic systems.

A good but largely unnoticed example of how all this can work occurred during the visit to Sierra Leone in of the then UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, Juan Mendez. When he became aware that hate speech was beginning to be heard on certain media outlets reminiscent of that which had been spread to devastating effect by Radio Milles Collines in Rwanda ten years earlier , he issued a statement making clear that such behaviour was potentially subject to prosecution in the new ICC and calling upon the national authorities to put an end to it, which they did.

What have been the political challenges since ? Has the international community been able to overcome the problem of political will? On the first point, the news by the end of last year was encouraging. Successive major debates in the UN General Assembly in and , revisiting the resolution, and another late last year in the context of establishing the Joint Office I mentioned, all saw attempts by small groups of spoilers to derail the consensus — and each time those attempts were rebuffed by the great, and indeed overwhelming, majority of other member states.

I was something of a warm-up act for the debate, arguing before the assembled delegates in the Trusteeship Council chamber for RtoP against my old nemesis Noam Chomsky who of course saw it as just a new excuse for the great powers to get up to their old imperialist interventionary tricks In the debate which followed, of the 94 delegates who spoke representing between them some member states, because some of the presentations were on behalf of regional or other groups , there were only four — Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua and Sudan — who sought to directly roll back in the interests of unqualified state sovereignty.

And that pattern was sustained last year. At the end of last year the evidence was mixed. Although increasingly invoked by key figures, including Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, obvious successes in its application were thin on the ground, with Kenya in early being the only really clear example of the responsibility to protect playing an important energizing role in stimulating an effective response to a rapidly emerging large-scale atrocity crime situation — with that response, interestingly, coming here in the form of a diplomatic rather than military solution.

Failures or weaknesses were easier to identify. The Democratic Republic of Congo can perhaps be regarded as another, although the UN, EU and African Union have made large-scale efforts to halt the slide into further violent chaos, and the problems in that continent-sized country are nightmarishly intractable.

The lesson I for one drew from the cases of non-application or ineffective application of the RtoP norm was not that the norm itself was inherently ineffective, or irrelevant. Rather it was that we just had to do much better in applying it in the future.

On the face of it these cases were spectacular steps forward. But there has certainly been a negative reaction to the very broad way in which NATO interpreted its mandate in Libya, and the question we have to address is whether we now have a new benchmark for how to handle extreme cases in the future, or whether this year will rather prove to be the high water mark from which the tide will subsequently recede.

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Comments 8 Add to Bookmarks English. Apr 27, Gareth Evans. Support High-Quality Commentary For more than 25 years, Project Syndicate has been guided by a simple credo: All people deserve access to a broad range of views by the world's foremost leaders and thinkers on the issues, events, and forces shaping their lives. Show More Contact Us. Your name Your email Friend's name Friend's email Message.

Cancel Send. Please select an option. Choose an option Please wait, fetching the form. Get our OnPoint newsletter. Since , moving from rhetoric to effective practice has had its difficulties, and plenty remain. But step by step, R2P has been gaining traction, and was when it really came of age: institutionally, conceptually, and on the ground. Better institutional machinery is rapidly evolving. The United Nations, regional organizations, and national governments have been establishing "focal points": officials whose day job it is to monitor emerging crises and energize responses.

In the United States, President Barack Obama recently directed the establishment of an interagency Atrocities Prevention Board designed to coordinate government responses to these situations, taking those responses to a new level of effectiveness.

Conceptually, we have seen an end to most of the confused debates that plagued earlier crises in places such as Burma, Sri Lanka, and Georgia about what are and are not R2P situations. There was no argument about the events in Kenya in early , those in Ivory Coast early this year, or those in Libya in the context of Benghazi, where Muammar al-Qaddafi talked — in language eerily reminiscent of the Rwandan genocidaires — of showing " no mercy and no pity " for the " cockroaches " who had risen against him.

Most dramatically, the U. Security Council has now not only expressly invoked R2P but given it effective sharp-end military application in Ivory Coast and Libya. The Libya intervention was much more prolonged and the interpretation by the NATO-led forces of the scope of its mandate much more controversial, but it unquestionably worked — certainly in preventing a major massacre in Benghazi and arguably in preventing many more civilian casualties elsewhere than would otherwise have been the case.

If the response had been as effective in in Rwanda, , victims of the worst modern genocide would still be alive. Major U.