Responsibility to Protect

Lord Collins of Highbury Excerpts

Thursday 16th July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

My Lords, I begin by adding my own tribute to the distinguished career of the noble Viscount, Lord Montgomery of Alamein. As we have heard, he has given great service to Parliament in two excellent shifts. His contribution to the success and well-being of our country has not been limited to his work in Parliament; in addition to his business career, he has built close links with Latin America and he has served as a patron and chairman of various Anglo-Latin American organisations. His contribution today is further testimony to his wisdom and insight into Parliament and international affairs. I wish him a very happy and healthy retirement: feliz jubilación.

I thank my noble friend Lord McConnell for initiating this important debate. It is important, in the context not only of the world today but of what we have seen in recent times. The genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda and the crimes against humanity in the former Yugoslavia, East Timor, Sri Lanka, Darfur and Syria demonstrate, as we have heard, extreme failures by the international community to respond to the threat of atrocity crimes. We have been confronted by complex choices regarding when and how to protect populations abroad and in living up to the conventions and laws to which we have signed up.

In responsibility to protect, the world community seeks to clarify where responsibility lies and to provide guidance on what sort of action should be taken to prevent these crimes taking place or escalating. My party is fully supportive of RtoP, and in the general election campaign we reaffirmed that in government we would ensure:

“A cross-Whitehall approach will be taken to preventing genocide and mass atrocity will be a priority with a focus on early warning and prevention”.

Ten years on, responsibility to protect has come a long way but, as we have heard in this debate, particularly from the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, the challenge is to put the good words fully into practice. The concrete examples that were highlighted by my noble friend in his introduction, and by other noble Lords, show how co-ordinating intelligence, development and economic and political engagement can be successful in preventing conflict that may lead to genocide.

Speaking in the General Assembly, the noble Lord, Lord Malloch-Brown, the Foreign Office Minister at the time, described RtoP as a “groundbreaking” achievement, of which the UN “should be rightly proud”. It should inform,

“all Member States’ work across the conflict spectrum, as well as on human rights and development”.

The coalition Government echoed the call to construct a “culture of prevention” when Ambassador Wilson of the UK Mission to the UN repeated that responsibility to protect,

“should be an important governing principle of all countries’ work across the conflict spectrum”.

The core principle of this is that all states have a responsibility to protect their populations from RtoP crimes. The responsibility rests first with the state. With RtoP, the international community has a responsibility to assist other countries in upholding their responsibility. Should states be unwilling or unable to protect, the international community should respond and take action to protect. However, as we have heard in this debate, that action is multifaceted. The international community has many different tools at its disposal for upholding its responsibility—diplomatic, humanitarian, and other peaceful means, such as human rights monitors, for example, to protect populations. The noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson, has talked much about the work of human rights protectors in Afghanistan, who are critical to that country’s future. Stronger measures, such as enforced sanctions or the use of military force authorised by the UN Security Council, can also be used if states are clearly failing to protect. We have heard about some of the issues surrounding how they could be used.

The UK has offered more than verbal support. It is a contributor to the pool that funds the joint office of the UN Secretary General’s special advisers on genocide and RtoP. It has also contributed funding to the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, most notably, as we heard in Question Time, its overseas aid policies, which have been guided by the cross-departmental Building Stability Overseas Strategy. However, as we heard, some question the extent to which this addresses the issue of mass atrocity prevention.

In his 2013 article, Humanitarian Intervention: What Future for the Responsibility to Protect?, Simon Adams concluded that the UK contribution to RtoP norm promotion was “laudable”. However, he also offered several observations on where he thought the UK could improve its implementation of the norm. One example he gave was the Central African Republic, which has long been high on the watch lists of organisations using a mass atrocity lens but did not even appear on the risk matrix that was published in the stabilisation unit’s business plan of April 2013. However, later in 2013, the UK helped transport a French intervention force that responded to the serious threat of mass atrocity. As a follow on from the Question earlier today, how fit for purpose does the Minister think that the existing strategy is?

Despite the lessons of tragic events in the past, such as the atrocities in Srebrenica 20 years ago that we have heard about from noble Lords, and the positive new approaches such as the Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict initiative, highlighted by the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson, there is concern that the UK has not made atrocity prevention a policy priority. As has been raised by my noble friend Lord Desai, we need to consider how the international community builds its capacity to respond, because the relatively small number of states that can take action in certain circumstances acts as a constraint on the Security Council agreeing that something should be done. As highlighted by my noble friend, that capacity could and should be filled up on a regional basis—for example, by the African Union in Africa.

There are a number of areas that I would appreciate the Minister responding to in his winding-up speech. In particular, if the UK’s current early warning analysis finds that there is a threat of atrocities in a certain country, how does this change the Government’s policy towards that state? Does DfID reconsider its approach to that country? Does it decide to prioritise the prevention of atrocity over something else? Is this a budgetary priority? Do development officers on the ground know that one of their goals is to prevent atrocities in the long term? Have they been trained to catch the warning signs, as we heard about in the debate today? Who has that responsibility? Finally, how do the Government co-ordinate action across departments to prevent atrocities? We have heard about the strategies that have been adopted but how are we going to see those move forward? Development assistance alone is not enough.