MV Editor’s note. The promotion of “humanitarian aid” as a tool for intervention in Venezuela advances in view of the impossibility that the United States has in imposing it formally from the OAS and the UN Security Council. Both failures in these instances to achieve recognition by acclamation of Juan Guaidó, including the subsequent veto of the use of military force in the U.S. Senate, have caused the opposition to organize under the call to demand the delivery of “humanitarian aid” no matter what. The extremist tone indicates that ” by any means necessary” involves the use of military force. The doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect (paradigm of “humanitarian intervention”, R2P), a resource that was first used in Kosovo (1999), has been put back on the agenda, remaining a reference to the violation of international law when armed intervention was carried out outside the UN Security Council. In view of this and because of the current approach, this platform decided to republish a work by lawyer and researcher Ana Cristina Bracho, who, since last year, had outlined this strategy and warned of its dangers.
According to Howard Zinn, the well-known American historian and pacifist, our entire civilization is based on a lie. For we have been made to believe that war is a permanent state, a derivative of human nature, and he negates this.
He reminds us that peoples do not launch themselves into war alone and that behind armed conflicts there are soldiers who will shoot at other people with no other sentiment than the desire to return home alive. He made this statement because Zinn was an American and a critic of American war adventures.
That is why we cannot look at international reality at any time without paying particular attention to propaganda actions and therein, to speeches, which are going to justify the invasion or attack of a particular nation.
In this article we will develop a legal debate on the subject where a dangerous reconfiguration is attempted around the idea of sovereignty and the prohibition of the crime of aggression, for the hypothetical privilege of human interests even though nobody has been able to demonstrate that the method improves the conditions that it supposedly seeks to change. Let us look at the meaning and the legal and human dimension of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P).
In this article we will develop a legal debate on the field where a dangerous reconfiguration is attempted around the idea of sovereignty and the prohibition of the crime of aggression, for the hypothetical privilege of human interests even though nobody has been able to demonstrate that the method improves the conditions that it supposedly wants to change. Let us look at the meaning and the legal and human dimension of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P).
A legal dimension of the world
According to the United Nations, there are 193 countries in the world. In other words, 193 territories with delimited borders and exercise of sovereignty. This number is not static, since it increases to the extent that there are territories that declare themselves independent for various reasons and the international community recognizes them, as well as decreases when there are confederations or other forms of absorption of States.
To count countries, the UN makes use of its own data because it considers that the final condition of existence of a State is to belong to that organization. There is only one exception, which is the case of observer states, a category that was previously only held by the Vatican and that since 2012 is shared with Palestine.
The UN is the entity of an international nature that functions at present and is made up of representatives of the governments of the States that comprise it, and whose margin of operation was established in a Charter that was signed on June 26, 1945 in San Francisco, at the end of the United Nations Conference on International Organization, and that entered into force on October 24 of the same year.
By looking at its structure, we will see that the United Nations has five main organs: the General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council, the International Court of Justice and the General Secretariat. The concepts behind the birth of this organization are a product of the climate at the end of the Second World War and were developed mainly by Roosevelt and European jurists.
There an institution was created in which not all the countries that existed at the time are invited, and in which the colonial order is not questioned as a formula of government of immense areas of the world, mainly in Asia and Africa.
The nascent organization was created as a complex system of counterweights that means that the will of States, gathered in the General Assembly, will have less force than the decisions adopted by the Security Council, of which only a part of the member countries, with the permanent presence of allies and the exorbitant privilege of the right of veto that makes the will of only one of five States able to do so, annuls all the ambitions or oppositions of the 193 countries.
It has not succeeded in containing war, establishing a formula for permanent peace, eradicating hunger and disease or making solid progress towards the primacy of human rights.
Its failure can be measured, from a diplomatic point of view, if we consider that there is not a single human rights treaty that has been ratified by all the countries of the world; from a legal point of view, because it does not have effective mechanisms for monitoring the obligations of its members; and finally, because since its inception, its performance has been questioned, since it has been regarded as dubious that it operates in a building that was linked to the Rockefellers.
And if this happens, with more or less uniformity throughout its existence, the decade of greatest scrutiny of the UN came at the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 21st century. For war has not stopped, its brutality has increased and the United Nations seems incapable of acting to prevent it. And then the rules prohibiting aggression, ordering respect for sovereignty and the sacredness of the Security Council’s decision, would be nullified when the United States government declared that it would launch an unprecedented war against Afghanistan, with the support of the United Kingdom.
The present is no more encouraging. The decisions taken by the United Nations mandating missions in certain territories often culminate in major scandals involving acts of corruption, forced prostitution, brutality by soldiers against civilian populations, and furthermore yielding little benefit for the peace or recovery of peoples.
This demonstrates to us that the United Nations, and consequently everything that refers to the relations of countries, is precarious legal territory, where basic formulas such as respect for the sovereignty and equality of States, the prohibition of aggression and attacks against civilians will depend on the interests expressed by those who, by military force, their veto capacity or economic importance within the organization are capable of achieving.
In conclusion, this universal scheme failed, and this is a truth that no one conceals. On the contrary, given its incapacity and the occurrence of acts inconceivable in legal terms of the organization, a reconfiguration has been proposed which is intended to be implemented against the will of the parties and which would authorize prohibited or unconsecrated acts in the corpus iuris, under a kind of logic according to which ends would justify means and neologisms would circumvent express prohibitions.
Thus, a doctrine as perverse as that of preventive war has entered through the cracks of the prohibition of the crime of aggression, and now, under the guise of legality, the concept of the Responsibility to Protect appears, with which the horrors that have caused the Syrian people to suffer and with which they now want to justify a military offensive against Venezuela have been protected.
History of a concept
The UN entered into debate after the events of the 1990s. Thus, the multilateral seems to have been caught and accused of crimes in Rwanda and the Balkan Peninsula. The conclusion, without looking at the factors involved and the interests in the conflicts, was that the order established in the organisation was insufficient to protect fundamental rights in the face of war and hostility. With this idea, began the search for alternative formulas to those provided in its legality.
Thus, Kofi Annan spoke in the Millennium Report, stating that international law had failed in Rwanda and Kosovo, suggesting that despite the prohibition of humanitarian intervention based on norms, an alternative should be sought to take action in the face of “flagrant and systematic violations of human rights”.
To respond to the Secretary General, a working group was formed in 2001 led by Canadians, and it would be this one that would coin the term “Responsibility to Protect”, under a logic inspired by the notion of deviating from the law to achieve an end that they consider more important than all the norms adopted. Then, to give it strength in 2004, influential personalities were summoned to endorse the new idea.
In 2005, for the first time, the term was used in a Summit of Heads of State, although it would be until 2009 that it would be used in an official text. It was a first resolution identified as A/63/L80 Rev. 1.
For those of us who work in the field of legal sciences, this is not a detail but a major point, because we are facing a construction that runs counter to the fundamental treaties and notions of the United Nations, whose allegedly noble purpose has been the subject of deep questioning.
Nevertheless, it has been used to authorize deployments from the Security Council. The first time the Security Council officially referred to the Responsibility to Protect was in April 2006, in resolution 1674 on the protection of civilians in armed conflict.
That was the first time that the Security Council referred to that resolution in August 2006, when it adopted resolution 1706 authorizing the deployment of United Nations peacekeeping troops in Darfur, Sudan. They would then be evoked to deal with events in Libya, Côte d’Ivoire, Yemen, Southern Sudan and finally, in 2012, the situation in Syria.
What is it all about, anyway?
According to a summary provided by the Emergency Rehabilitation and Development Group,
“The R2P doctrine concerns the responsibility of States and the international community to protect the civilian population against four specific types of crimes and violations of human rights: genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. The central idea of this doctrine is that the State is not solely responsible for the welfare of the population. If it fails or manifestly shirks its responsibility, the international community must do so, with full respect for the principles of international law and the Charter of the United Nations. R2P involves three dimensions: responsibility for prevention, reaction (with diplomatic, legal and other specific measures; with coercive means such as sanctions; and with force as a last resort) and reconstruction.”
When we read it, we can see that, in order to invoke it, it is necessary to establish a standard legal situation, that is, defined by international law. It is not enough, for example, to have an economic crisis or a situation of political conflict.
This helps us to understand why, from time to time, opposition spokesmen and their international allies have begun to use a vocabulary foreign to our usual political jargon, referring, for example, to the fact that the Venezuelan government seeks to “exterminate the population,” that a detainee who is known to be in prison is “disappeared,” or that, as the OAS Secretary General recently said, action should be taken to prevent genocide in Venezuela.
The second point is legally more complex, because the first would depend on the existence of a factual situation that is assimilated to a typical legal assumption through the declarations, investigations and opinions of the organizations attached to the UN.
In this context, we can understand the complex articulation of subjects, such as the OAS meeting with the Commission on Human Rights in Geneva, the appointment of an authority for “Venezuelan refugees,” or the strategies of Ambassador Nikki Haley to debate the issue of Venezuela before the Security Council.
However, from a legal point of view, we might give ourselves room to be naive and not to read politically what is happening saying that they are valid mechanisms for someone to prove a fact of which they are intimately convinced. On the other hand, to think that the State ceases to be solely responsible for the welfare of its population, and that for this reason it may be separated from its sovereignty for another to intervene, means breaking the fundamental basis of International Law, based precisely on the idea that all Law derives from the power of a State.
If this were not complex, or if it were enough for us to say that there is a superior purpose in the preservation of the species, we would be confronted with an additional problem, because this is being done with a resolution and disregard of treaties. Therefore, this idea is contrary to the whole system that, in order to favour peace and development, was promulgated from the genesis of Western civilization.
Resuscitate asphyxiation victims through strangulation
Returning to our reality, now we see that it makes sense to discuss an issue over and over again, even though we know that we are not going to have enough votes or arguments to support it, because this will sustain in the future that the diplomatic route must be considered exhausted because no progress has been made.
Critics of this institution do not limit themselves to considering its legal precariousness and point to the absurdity of facing a situation of scarcity with sanctions, as well as violence with military actions.
We can see that violence has not lost ground in world conflicts and that, on the contrary, in the countries where it has been applied, the situations that were intended to be eradicated have not ceased but have become more complex and aggravated, bringing innumerable human and material losses that generate the backwardness of the guarantee of fundamental rights in those territories.
It is important for our analysis to consider that this practice has not achieved the absolute consensus of the members of the United Nations either, nor has its application been eliminated when the rejection mechanisms provided for in the Charter of the Organization have been applied, since, for example, its use in Syria was denied by Russia and China.
A neocolonial instrument
Finally, there is a major philosophical problem with this issue, because while the macro concepts that are theoretically used to authorize the use of this formula have a framework set out in the Rome Statute, human rights standards, ways of surviving and building culture vary significantly from country to country.
When through this R2P it is authorized that a group of States act on a country and against the will of the local government, we see in the scenario a world divided between civilized countries and barbaric countries, where the former decide who is similar to them and who is not.
Is Syria today a country with better conditions than it had in 2012? Has the intervention of Western countries served to improve democratic guarantees? Is it legal that, when the Syrians have expressed their will to remain under the same government, an international coalition destroys their country?
You may not like this example, and if so, review what has happened in Sudan, where, incidentally, after the partition of the country, the situation that persisted in the state that was born of that nation’s oil spill must be examined.
Translation by Internationalist 360°
