House Considering U.N. Initiative to Bolster World's Response to Genocide #ABAChicago
When the U.N. General Assembly convened a World Summit in 2005, it set forth the doctrine that states have an obligation to protect their citizens from genocide, war crimes and ethnic cleansing; and if a state fails to do so, then the responsibility falls to the larger community of nations.
But articulating the responsibility to protect doctrine was one thing. Now, the U.N. and its member states have to figure out how to put the doctrine into effect in a world community with a pretty poor record of preventing genocide and other mass crimes since World War II.
“The promise of ‘never again’ has never been redeemed, and I don’t see a likelihood that it will be redeemed,” said M. Cherif Bassiouni, who spoke Sunday on a panel sponsored by the ABA Center for Human Rights during the association’s annual meeting in Chicago. Bassiouni is president emeritus of the International Human Rights Law Institute at DePaul University College of Law in Chicago.
The record, Bassiouni said, is that more than 300 conflicts since World War II have caused the deaths of between 92 million and 101 million people—roughly double the numbers killed in the two world wars combined—the vast majority of them civilians. Those numbers were gathered for a study on post-conflict justice that Bassiouni is directing with funding from the European Union. A report is due at the end of this year.
Despite the promises of globalization, Bassiouni said, “We are going through a period where we really don’t want to be our poor brother’s keeper, but that also means we don’t want to share our wealth, resources and technology. Basically, nations are looking to gain power and wealth. It is like medieval times.”
While there is some skepticism about the prospects for the responsibility to protect doctrine—Bassiouni describes his view as “realistic”—efforts are under way at the U.N. and within the human rights community to move the doctrine forward. The question is how much steam the effort is building.
The Center for Human Rights is the lead sponsor of a recommendation that the ABA House of Delegates endorse the responsibility to protect doctrine. The House convened at 9 a.m. Monday and is expected to wrap up its work some time on Tuesday afternoon.
In late July, the U.N. General Assembly began discussions about how to implement the doctrine. But even at that early stage, cracks were starting to appear as some nations objected that the doctrine has the stale whiff of colonialism and would threaten to intrude on national sovereignty.
So far, the Obama administration has been sending mixed signals on the issue, Lawrence Woocher said during Sunday’s panel. Some communications from the administration have been encouraging, “but we haven’t seen the kind of clear statement from President Obama that we had hoped for,” said Woocher, a senior program officer at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C.
“This is a debate that is nowhere near its end point,” said panel moderator David J. Scheffer, a U.S. ambassador at large for war crimes issues during the Clinton administration who now directs the Center for International Human Rights at Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago.
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