International law recognizes the right of countries to intervene in other states for humanitarian purposes, but many members of the international community have criticized the doctrine in practice, said British diplomat Sir Emyr Jones Parry and Edward Luck '70, special adviser to the United Nations secretary-general, at a Friday lecture in Kemeny Hall.
Parry and Luck focused on the concept of the "responsibility to protect" in international relations. Under the doctrine, the international community is obliged to intervene in states where the government does not adequately provide for its people or actively commits atrocities against them.
Luck, the senior vice president of the International Peace Academy, argued that the international community should take a long-term approach to developing the definition of responsibility to protect, or R2P, which is still in its formative stages in international law and has not been recognized worldwide.
Parry, the United Kingdom's former permanent representative to the UN, disagreed, claiming that nations must intervene rapidly to prevent human rights violations regardless of international law.
"If you're dying, either from genocide or from neglect by the member state, it doesn't matter why," Parry said. "The international community should have the balls to intervene, and it doesn't."
Luck advocated a measured and incremental approach to R2P. He said the number of refugees, wars and cases of civil unrest have decreased worldwide, and attributed the decline to international efforts. While critics point to the failure of R2P policy in Darfur, there are many other successful examples of humanitarian intervention, such as the end of recent violence in Kenya, which do not get much attention, he said.
"The only way you can deal with the UN is a lot of idealism, a lot of cynicism, in about a 50-50 mix," he said. "You have to build these things step by step."
Parry was less optimistic about the progress of R2P and criticized the incremental approach. Despite advances made in formalizing R2P in international law, he said he believes more action is needed.
"People are going to die in their old age in Burma who know nothing other than oppression," Parry said, explaining that piecemeal efforts would bring change too slowly to help those living under Myanmar's military junta. "We can't, in my view, be quite so complacent as an international community, because all the time, people are dying and we can't act."
Parry brought much of his own experience to bear on the question of inaction. He described government atrocities he witnessed in Kosovo while negotiating humanitarian conditions with the government of Yugoslavia in the late 1990s. In this situation, he said, the international intervention that eventually occurred was necessary, though NATO's intervention in 1999 was not strictly permitted by international law.
"NATO took upon itself the right to press upon humanitarian intervention," Parry said. "There was no [UN] Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force. We were in different territory in Kosovo."
Parry used the situation in Kosovo to illustrate both the need for an intervention framework and the difficulties that face those trying to develop R2P. The legal ambiguities of the issue itself, he said, have led to disagreement among the interested states.
"I doubt that 40 percent of the membership of the UN has accepted that, in practice, [the responsibility to protect] should transcend the rights of a member state," he said. "That's the difficulty of the issue. It's the political will of nations -- are they willing to see action?"
Luck questioned whether a stronger legal framework for R2P would have improved the situation in Kosovo.
"Historians are very much debating whether the threat was exaggerated or not," he said. "It was certainly repugnant, but would it have triggered an R2P response?"
Despite the controversy surrounding R2P, defining the responsibility to protect is a task that will continue to face states in the future, both speakers said.
"That, in essence, is the dilemma," Parry said. "What can we do? What should we do? It remains a very vital but sensitive subject."
