Responsibility to Protect

Lord Desai Excerpts

Thursday 16th July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, let me start by paying tribute to the noble Viscount, Lord Montgomery. When I arrived here in 1991, he took me in hand and introduced me to the IPU, and took me to different capitals and educated me in the vital role that the IPU plays. He also taught me a lot about Latin America. We shall miss him, but as the noble Baroness, Lady Hooper, said, we hope that he keeps coming back to tell us about how he is improving the world.

I am somewhat puzzled by this issue. It is not that I am against responsibility to protect, but as the international community is losing its will to protect, it is adding to its agenda more and more responsibilities to protect. Responsibility to protect is actually an admission of a massive failure by the United Nations when it could have done something to prevent massacres in Srebrenica and even more so in Rwanda; we all know that. I am sorry to be cynical, but a typical response by national and international organisations is that, when they fail to do something, they double the ante: the next time, they just raise their targets rather than admit that the targets have not been met. What we have right now is a situation so unlike the one in 1995 or 2005 that it is a puzzle that any of these responsibilities could be fulfilled, given not just the strength we have but the willingness to intervene.

Noble Lords will recall that we were called back for a debate on Syria, when Syria had chemical weapons. I think that I was one of the few people to say that we should intervene, and the question was not if, but when. We did not intervene. A massive assault on human rights has been carried out in the Middle East by Syria, ISIL and whoever else. While we have poked at the margins, we have been reluctant to fight. Our reluctance to fight is now deep in our Parliament. Parliament will not sanction our interventions. Perhaps it may if they are under a UN flag, but by and large the UN flag is hard to get hold of. The Security Council being what it is, we will not get unanimity among the P5.

So we face the problem that the international order set up and preserved by NATO and the other allied powers is no longer willing to do its task. Therefore, we have an anarchic situation in which, whatever we may say about our need to intervene, given our interdependence and the many problems arising from the violation of human rights, I do not know how we are going to fashion effective strategies. Let us take an example. The European Union, excepting ourselves and France, does not have an army to speak of. We saw that in Afghanistan. The best that the Italians would do was to send a medical supplies corps. The European Union lives in a world in which it believes that wars will not happen and there will be peace for ever. Unfortunately, that is not the world in which we live, as President Putin has shown us.

The question of how we reconstruct the willingness and strength to intervene in many such situations is an urgent problem that has to be tackled before we can deliver on responsibility to protect. This is where the United Nations needs urgent reform. Without reforming the Security Council and the way it works, we will be hobbled. We have not harnessed other nations—the so-called emerging nations—which could help. I know we have often used countries such as India and Indonesia in the UN peacekeeping force, but we have not systematically created a capability within the United Nations to intervene on its own if it needs to. It has to rely on countries, and while those countries may have some forces, they lack popular parliamentary support to intervene.

So we are drifting along, and for the past five years we have seen in the Middle East one of the biggest and most vicious wars among Muslim nations. The Sunnis and the Shias are killing each other. The states themselves—the first pillar, as my noble friend Lord McConnell said—are doing a lot of damage to the human rights of their own citizens. If we cannot stop President Assad or invade the territory ISIL occupies, we will, embarrassingly, just have to sit back and watch human rights being violated.

So we need to ask ourselves, what sort of world order is needed to deliver on responsibility to protect? What sort of world order is needed in this new globalised world? It is not the 1945 order, as is now absolutely clear. I do not think it likely that we can reconstruct the old Anglo-American alliance, because we just do not want to fight. We even had difficulty affirming a 2% share of GDP for our defence budget, and if you are not going to support that, you should not be talking about responsibility to protect. Such considerations are interconnected. We really ought to think about how we can strengthen the United Nations with a better, more representative Security Council in which a single nation’s veto will not prevent action being taken, because that is what often cripples the UN. This question has been on the agenda for I do not know how many years. Expert groups have been appointed, but mainly they are from inside the United Nations, and nobody from inside the UN ever wants to reform it because they are all very happy with the way it is. Either we expand the Security Council, or we modify the veto rule using the qualified majority voting that the European Union uses.

Something has to be done to reform the United Nations to improve its ability to intervene. We have to equip it with some sort of permanent or semi-permanent armed force, recruited from among its members—voluntarily contributing. That would allow it to intervene on its own, without having to go through the circuit of individual sovereign nations. It is not a question of goading the United Kingdom Government to do more. They may or may not do more, but the United Kingdom is not the country which can alone solve this problem. Our need to establish responsibility to protect on a more solid basis must be accompanied by reform of the United Nations, so that it can become more capable of acting on the responsibilities it keeps adding to its agenda. Either it should stop adding such responsibilities and slim down its goals, or it should strengthen its own ability, reform its structures and practices, and become a seriously effective international organisation that can, rather than “govern”, supervise and monitor the way the international situation is deteriorating.