[LINK] "The suspension of intervention"

[rfmcdonald]

Lysiane Gagnon at The Globe and Mail writes about how international jurist Louise Arbour now rejects the Responsibility to Protect doctrine that she helped form, as unworkable and dangerous.

Former Supreme Court justice Louise Arbour was one of the main architects of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine that has shaped Western policies in recent years. She was chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

[. . .]

One could go further and conclude that initiatives like the International Criminal Court and the R2P theory have actually been tragically counterproductive. The international court almost exclusively pits a tribunal based on Western legal values against Third World war criminals. But “the initiation and unfolding of criminal prosecution,” Ms. Arbour now concedes, “can complicate if not impede peace processes.” One wonders whether the slower, reconciliatory approach used in countries such as Rwanda and South Africa isn’t preferable.

What is certain is that the West has failed in its efforts to force its notion of human rights on countries that have yet to develop them internally, Ms. Arbour told Mr. Saunders. As for the R2P doctrine, a theory that Ms. Arbour once promoted and that was later adopted by the UN Security Council, she concludes that it is a failure.

The 2011 North Atlantic Treaty Organization military intervention in Libya is the most obvious case in point. The bombing – a response to a verbal threat uttered by dictator Moammar Gadhafi against rebels based in Benghazi – resulted in the collapse of the country, which has become a failed state and a launching ground for terrorist organizations.

R2P was based on ideas espoused by the likes of Samantha Power, an academic who became U.S. ambassador to the UN, who was among those outraged by how the free world looked the other way during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Thus was born the idea that the duty to prevent crimes against humanity should take precedence over state sovereignty. The humanitarian left embraced it, conveniently overlooking that George W. Bush’s infamous invasion of Iraq in 2003 was based on exactly the same idea.