iR2P

Three years ago, I sat in on a meeting with some of the negotiators at the 2005 World Summit.  It was the morning after the Summit outcome document had been approved – something that had looked very unlikely even 36 hours before.  All were exhausted.

“It’s not a bad result,” one said.  “But we didn’t get the Responsibility to Protect.”

That was wrong, of course.  R2P was in, shoehorned in a blur of final deals.  I’d bet that some of the presidents and prime ministers in New York didn’t know R2P was in either.

That it slid into the document was a tribute to an uneasy alliance that emerged during the summit talks: EU and African states, led by Rwanda, had pushed aside objection from the R2P-sceptics like India.  For a moment, that alliance looked like the future of the UN.

Now it looks like it’s falling apart.  Last week, Franziska Brantner and I published a report for the European Council on Foreign Relations on the EU, UN and human rights.

It shows that the overall level of support for EU positions in human rights votes in the General Assembly has fallen from 70+% in 1998 to around 50% in the last two sessions.

That’s a gradual drop – in the same votes, support for American positions on human rights has gone from 77% to about 30%.  That probably makes John Bolton really happy.

Equally striking is that China and Russia have been gaining friends.  As the EU has slid down, they’ve seen their support rise by a comparable amount: from about 50% to 75%.

The figures contain all sorts of anomalies and quirky details – the votes cover everything from the rights of the child to human rights abuses in Iran, so generalization is tricky.  But it’s pretty obvious that the rise in backing for China reflects bigger political trends.

Yet looking at the data, the thing I’ve found most depressing is the divergence between the African and European blocs on rights.  Ten years ago, nearly half the African members of the UN typically voted with the EU on human rights.  Now just six do so.

That shouldn’t come as a surprise.  The Zimbabwe case and the dispute over the ICC indictment of Sudan’s President Bashir have suggested a growing gap between African and European ideas on international justice.  The deepening dispute between France and Rwanda over events surrounding the 1994 genocide has become ever more venomous.

What’s gone wrong?  The past decade has seen the West support a series of initiatives for Africa: the MDGs, help against AIDS, the boom in UN peacekeeping and the creation of the African Union.  Numerous European leaders have got great press for African trips.

But they have failed to allay many African worries.  European appeals to international justice look like efforts to dictate terms to Africa.  African analysts revolted by Robert Mugabe’s rule remain suspicious of Britain’s role in Zimbabwe.  Why has every ICC indictment to date involved an African?  Why are European leaders happy to talk about human rights in Africa at the UN but not about the rights of African migrants in Europe?

You can argue about each of those issues for a very long time.  But the overall sense that European and African countries have a common interest in international law and order – the touchstone of those hopeful UN moments in 2005 – seems to be slipping away fast.

That is bad news for R2P.  Ban Ki-moon and his Special Advisor on R2P Ed Luck have worked hard to build an international consensus on the concept (check out this excellent report on their efforts) but at the same time, the news from Darfur has always been grim.  

Now the day-to-day operational problems in Darfur are being overshadowed by a Euro-African debate over whether the ICC’s pursuit of Bashir will put African peacekeepers at risk.  In precisely the place where R2P should be turned a reality, there’s a dog-fight over the limits of international law instead.

Whoever wins that argument, the idea of R2P – especially in its most robust form of international intervention – could be a significant victim.  If R2P is going to stand a chance in future, European and African leaders need to rediscover the spirit of 2005.  It’s time for a strategic dialogue on how international institutions and justice work in Africa.

If that discussion doesn’t take place, maybe we didn’t get R2P after all.

Richard Gowan is the Associate Director for Policy at the NYU Center on International Cooperation, and UN Policy Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.