Is there a 'responsibility to protect'? Is the UN capable of protecting the victims of internal conflicts?

Résumé du document

Since the end of the Cold War, Civil wars are the dominant form of conflicts all around the world. As Stephen John Stedman explains, 'all thirty-five of the wars in 1997 were primarily internal'. Thus, in the current scenario, massive violence, destruction and killing tend, to happen within states borders and not in an inter-state context. Moreover, empirical studies show that among the total casualty figures of internal wars since 1945, (the so-called wars of the third kind'), 'approximately 90% of the casualties were civilians'. As an international organization whose primary purpose is to promote global peace and the respect of human rights, the UN can be expected to intervene in order to protect the victims of these civil wars and to establish peace. However this idea is often undermined by the concept of state sovereignty.

Extraits

[...] For instance, the United States withdrew its troops from the UN mandated operation in Somalia, when they understood that the situation had changed and that military risks had increased. It can then be argued that 'countries that champion humanitarian values are at the same time, and for understandable reasons, reluctant to risk the lives of their soldiers to defend human rights, even when the humanitarian disaster takes place in geographic proximity' . So, even if humanitarian intervention and protection of refugees and other victims of third kind wars appears as a duty for the international community and more specifically the UN, reluctance to enter a long conflict costly in terms of soldiers lives and money and attachment to the concept of sovereignty are two current obstacles for the organization while trying to fulfil its mission If the international community encounters so much difficulty to agree on the degree to which the principle of non-intervention in the domestic jurisdiction of a sovereign state can be overruled in the case of gross human rights violations and genocide, many have argued that the concept of sovereignty on itself had to be rethought. [...]

[...] A 'responsible' sovereignty has so a double-side effect. First, states have a responsibility towards their inhabitants; they have to guarantee a safe and secure environment where human rights and dignity are respected or, if they do not, be prepared and accept an external intervention. But, furthermore, a conception of sovereignty as such, give responsibilities to all states who must intervene, military if needed, when another one fails to live up its responsibilities to its inhabitants. Then, 'far from sovereignty being a constraint on external interference in internal affairs, sovereignty will entail a positive obligation to interfere in other's internal affairs' . [...]

[...] Thus, the most important difficulty for the UN when it comes to act on behalf of humanitarian purposes is the issue of state sovereignty. Indeed, in its own Charter, it claims that the organization is 'based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its members' . Most agree that today this principle should be questioned in order to allow humanitarian interventions, and this because of the moral reasons I have expressed before, but the problem is that there is a 'lack of consensus in the international community over how to achieve a proper balance between sovereignty and human rights' . [...]

[...] Is there a ‘responsibility to protect ? Is the UN capable of protecting the victims of internal conflicts ? Is there a 'responsibility to protect'? Is the UN capable of protecting the victims of internal conflicts? Civil wars are, today, since the end of the Cold War, the dominant form of conflicts all around the world. For instance, as Stephen John Stedman explains, 'all thirty-five of the wars in 1997 were primarily internal' . [...]

[...] Indeed, with sovereignty as responsibility, there is no more the question of a choice to make between sovereignty and humanitarian intervention but rather a clear, explicit obligation to intervene which makes part of this redefined concept of 4 sovereignty. In conclusion, in today's context where third kind wars are the dominant form of conflicts, humanitarian intervention is still a controversial matter. Indeed, the issue of state sovereignty is still highly rooted in the mentalities and sometimes very cherished, as a mean to prevent strong powers to intervene in small and weak states internal affairs. [...]