iR2P

It’s been far too long. Sorry about that. I can hardly claim there’s been any lack of developments to write about, what with the arrest of Nkunda and subsequent operations against the FDLR in eastern Congo, the sad loss of Alison des Forges, all the recent controversy surrounding the ICC’s indictment of the President of Sudan, and the ongoing plight of civilians trapped in Sri Lanka.

In my defence, I can only cite a baby and a couple of demanding day jobs. Anyway, here’s a bumper edition to make up for lost time.

The UN has just published a report in the name of the Secretary General describing ‘the efforts of the United Nations system to prevent genocide and the activities of the Special Advisor to the Secretary General on the prevention of genocide’, aka Francis Deng (link | pdf). The report focuses on efforts to improve the UN’s information gathering, analysis and early warning for this purpose, and offers a set of eight criteria to aid identification and analysis of situations of concern.

Also doing the rounds - but remaining somewhat obscure, for reasons that are equally obscure, and shared with you on a strictly ’need to know’ basis - is this report on efforts to implement the Responsibility to Protect. Hearteningly, it contains several references to individual responsibility, in reference to the need to do more to bring perpetrators to justice, to encourage and support survivors, and “to foster individual responsibility”:

One of the keys to preventing small crimes from becoming large ones, as well as to ending such affronts to human dignity altogether, is to foster individual responsibility. Even in the worst genocide, there are ordinary people who refuse to be complicit in the collective evil, who display the values, the independence and the will to say no to those who would plunge their societies into cauldrons of cruelty, injustice, hatred and violence. We need to do more to recognize their courage and learn from their actions. States that have suffered such traumas, civil society and international organizations can facilitate the development of national and transnational networks of survivors, so that their stories and lessons can be more widely heard, thus helping to prevent their reoccurrence or repetition elsewhere.”

The report furthermore acknowledges,

States and intergovernmental organizations, of course, are hardly the only influential actors in situations relating to the responsibility to protect… The multiple roles of domestic or transnational civil society in advocacy, early warning, monitoring, research, training and education are well known and are readily and repeatedly acknowledged in the present report. Less well known is the role of individuals, advocacy groups, women’s groups and the private sector in shaping the international response to crimes and violations relating to the responsibility to protect. Like the United Nations itself, international civil society learned lessons from the relatively muted, slow and scattered public response to the genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda. The mass, well organized and highly visible transnational campaigns against the violence in Darfur have demonstrated both the power and the limitations of such movements. They have shown the depth and breadth of public concern over ending the violence against the beleaguered population of Darfur, even as they have highlighted how inadequate our policy tools are and how fleeting is the political will to use them.

Back in January, the Obama Administration (the phrase hasn’t lost its charm), having said very little on the subject of R2P during the campaign, declared its support for the doctrine. Susan Rice, US Ambassador to the UN, reportedly told the Security Council,

“As agreed to by member states in 2005 and by the Security Council in 2006, the international community has a responsibility to protect civilian populations from violations of international humanitarian law when states are unwilling or unable to do so. But this commitment is only as effective as the willingness of all nations, large and small, to take concrete action. The United States takes this responsibility seriously.“

Michelle, writing for the Stop Genocide blog at Change.org, remains unimpressed by mere words, and has rewritten the relevant paragraphs of the Millennium Summit Outcome Document to better reflect the story so far.