WFI Events
Upcoming Events
Upcoming events dealing with issues that are important to CGS and WFI. Please see the organizers' event pages for more information.
Deadline for applying to the 2008 ACUNS-ASIL Summer Workshop is April 14
For more information on the call for papers, visit www.acuns.org
Iraq: What to Do? April 12, 2008
Presented by Global Constitution Forums. Saturday, 9-5
National Constitution Center , Kirby Auditorium
+ Visit Planetafilia.org (in Spanish)
+ Read Conference Schedule (PDF 75k)
10th International Conference of the International Law and Ethics Conferences (ILEC)
"World Governance: Do We Need It, Is It Possible, What Could It (All) Mean?"
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In the age of globalization, and increased interdependence in the world that we face today, there is a question we have to raise: Do we need and could we attain a world government, capable of insuring the peace and facilitating worldwide
The International Law and Ethics Conference Series (ILECS), now in its 10th year, was envisaged as an opportunity for leading American and Western European scholars (initially philosophers and now these are increasingly multi- disciplinary gatherings) to meet with their Eastern European counterparts and discuss issues of global importance. This on-going project has been designed as a pair of annual conferences held at Belgrade University in June with follow-ups (usually) in October in the US. >From 2004, ILECS was organized biannually. As before, we plan to publish a volume based on the conference.
Contact:
Professor Jovan Babic
Meet the Fellows
Have a question for one of our Fellows? Get a chance to talk to them in person at one of these events.
Building a New World
+ World Prout Assembly 2008 Conference, May 19-25, 2008 Radford, Virginia
Past Events
Past events dealing with issues that are important to CGS and WFI. Please see the organizers' event pages for more information.
Connect the Dots with Lila Garrett on Monday, Dec. 17 at 7 am PST . He discussed the Iran National Intelligence Estimate and its ramifications for nuclear proliferation.
+ Click Here to Listen
Applying the Responsibility to Protect Principle to Darfur
Read Applying the Responisbility to Protect Principle to Darfur
I. Origin and History of the R2P principle
The "Responsibility to Protect" concept first appeared in the report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereigny published in December 2001 by the International Development Research Centre in Ottawa, Canada.
This commission was initiated by Lloyd Axworthy, former Foreign Affairs Minister of Canada, in response to concerns about the NATO intervention in Kosovo (1999) without U.N. Security Council authorization on the one hand and the lack of international action to prevent the genocide in Rwanda (1994) on the other.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan had called for the international community to "forge unity" on the issue of how to deal with gross violations of human rights when international inter- vention would seem to violate the principle of national sovereignty.
The commission was appointed by the government of Canada and a group of major foundations, & its composition was announced to the U.N. General Assembly in Sep 2000.
Co-Chairs were Gareth Evans of Australia and Mohamed Sahnoun of Algeria. The other members were Giséle Coté-Harper of Canada, Lee Hamilton of the United States, Michael Ignatieff of Canada, Vladimir Lukin of Russia, Klaus Naumann of Germany, Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa, Fidel Ramos of the Philippines, Cornelio Sommaruga of Switzerland, Eduardo Stein Barillas of Guatemala, and Ramesh Thakur of India.
Issues to be addressed by the Commission were: Does the international community ever have the right to intervene within the borders of a sovereign nation-state? If so, under what conditions? What theoretical base could possibly justify such outside intervention?
The Commission's answer calls attention to the obligation of governments to preserve the "personal security" of their citizens as well as their "national security" against other countries.
It is argued that the notion of "state sovereignty implies a dual responsibility." Each state has the responsibility not only "to respect the sovereignty of other states" but also "to respect the dignity and basic rights of people within the state."
The Commission report says, "We prefer to talk not of a 'right to intervene' but of a 'responsibility to protect.'" (p. 11) The key point is to shift focus from "sovereignty as control" to "sovereignty as responsibility." (p. 13)
The Commission deliberately refrained from using the term "humanitarian intervention" in deference to humanitarian groups who object to using that expression in any situation where military action is being employed. (p. 9)
Sovereignty as responsibility means that leaders of governments: (1) must protect their citizens & promote their welfare, (2) are responsible to both their citizens & the international community through the U.N., & (3) can be held liable for their acts of commission & omission.
Not only do international criminal tribunals have a right to exert jurisdiction, but for crimes like genocide where treaties provide for universal jurisdiction even other national governments can act to enforce the law.
But the Commission cautions that "It is only when national systems of justice either cannot or will not act to judge crimes against humanity that universal jurisdiction and other international options should come into play." The national governments have first responsibilty.
Furthermore, the responsibility to protect includes (both for national governments and for the international community) not only the responsibility to react to human catastrophes but also to prevent them and to rebuild the community afterwards. (p. 17)
Much of the Commission's 85-page report deals with very detailed commentary about specific situations such as the responsibility to protect individual citizens, the responsibility to prevent catastrophes, the responsibility to react to catastrophes, the responsibility to rebuild the community after interventions, the various roles of the U.N. in interventions, the issue of how military interventions are to be carried out, and what needs to be done in the future -- all with many references to specific past incidents, e.g. Kosovo, Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, Iraq, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Cambodia, and East Timor.
In conclusion this report by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereigny proposes a re-interpretation of the notion of "national sovereignty" so that it includes the responsibility of a state to protect the security of its own citizens. If it fails to do that, then the international community and other states have an obligation to do it.
The R2P principle gets official support from the United Nations.
In December 2004 (3 years later) UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges, & Change fully embraced & called for implementation of the R2P principle.
The next year the Secretary-General's report In Larger Freedom: Towards Development, Security, and Human Rights for All presenting recommendations for action to the 60th General Assembly included a reference to the "emerging norm of the Responsibility to Protect."
In September 2005 the U.N. General Assembly incorporated the Responsibility to Protect principle into paragraphs 138 and 139 of the World Summit Outcome Document.
On April 28, 2006 these two key paragraphs of the World Summit Outcome Document were affirmed unanimously by the U.N. Security Council in its Resolution 1674 on the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict, which says:"The Security Council reaffirms the provisions of paragraphs 138 and 139 of the World Summit Outcome Document regarding the responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity."
II. The R2P principle gets applied to Darfur.
In March 2007 a report by the UN High-Level Mission of the Human Rights Commission on the situation in Darfur, led by Nobel Prize winner Jody Williams, disturbed by the failure of the May 2006 Darfur Peace Agreement to do much to improve the situation, called on the international community to take action, noting that the Responsibility to Protect principle required it.
But the government of Sudan refused to allow the Mission to enter Sudan to carry on its investigation and objected to the use of the R2P framework in the report.
The UN Human Rights Commission then appointed a new working group to work with the African Union and the Sudanese government on this issue, but the Sudanese government says that it has done nothing wrong and is doing what it can to protect to protect is citizens' rights.
Civil society is pushing the national governments to act responsibly.
The coordination of the NGOs in this effort is in the hands of the World Federalist Movement-Institute for Global Policy (WFM-IGP) in New York, who were asked to fulfill that task by the Canadian government. This coordination is being done under the name "Responsibility to Protect-Engaging Civil Society" or more simply "r2p-cs" (where "cs" is for "civil society"). The e-mail address is r2p-cs@wfm.org . One success for this civil society effort was the March 14, 2007 adoption by the Board of Supervisors of the City & County of San Francisco of a "Resolution Endorsing the UN Principle of the Responsibility to Protect."
A global public opinion poll released April 5, 2007 by and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs showed worldwide support for applying the R2P principle to the Darfur tragedy. Referring to that poll Andrew Stroehlein and Gareth Evans noted: "On the . . . question of whether the UN Security Council has the 'responsibility to authorize the use of military force to prevent severe human rights violations such as genocide, even against the will of their own government,' strong majorities in many countries replied favorably: 74% of Americans agreed, along with 69% of Palestinians, 66% of Armenians, 64% of Israelis, 54% of French and Poles, and 51% of Indians. And all populations polled were more in favor than opposed. . . . [T]he most surprising result emerged from China. Though its government has long been considered a staunch defender of state sovereignty under just about all circumstances, a full 76% of Chinese citizens agreed the Security Council had a responsibility to intervene when such mass crimes were taking place."
III. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon calls for implementation of R2P in Sudan
Speaking April 9, 2007 UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said: "All the world's governments have agreed in principle to the responsibility to protect. Our challenge now is to give real meaning to the concept, by taking steps to make it operational."
The Secretary-General then indicated that he was making his special adviser for the prevention of genocide (Juan Mendez of Argentina) a full-time post & that he was upgrading the UN Advisory Committee on Genocide Prevention. But so far Sudan's government still stalls.
+ Read the Responsibility to Protect
+ Envisioning a More Democratic Global System, April 2006, Widener University
+ Xavier University 3rd Annual Vision of Hope Speaker Series, 2007-2008
Read Moving from a War System to Enduring Peace
I. The issue for us is not just how to end the war in Iraq or stop the violence against some innocent people in Sudan or Burma. We must aim to end all war and tyranny.
When I tell people that my life is dedicated to abolishing war, I often get the response, "You will never be able to get rid of all conflict." My response is "Conflict isn't always bad. Sometimes it stops injustice and provides a basis for progress."
But war and unjustified violence, whether among nations or within nations, is always bad; we all need to join in the effort to abolish them from human society.
II. To successfully deal with war and unjustified violence (or any other problem) we must get clear on the precise nature of the problem to be solved.
"War, whether between countries or within countries, is large-scale, violent conflict between organized groups which already are governments or which seek to establish their own government over some territory." (Ronald J. Glossop, CONFRONTING WAR, 4th ed., p. 10).
This definition makes it clear that not all conflict is war, that war is not between separate individuals but groups, that war is for political power, and that there is a geographical area over which governmental control is sought.
This definition completely agrees with the statement of the famous scholar Carl von Clausewitz that "war is a mere continuation of politics by other means."
To see what can serve as an alternative to war, in that definition of "war," let us change the word "violent" to "nonviolent." What do we now have a definition of? Something (what is it?) is large-scale, NONviolent conflict between organized groups which already are governments or which seek to establish their own govern-ment over some territory." This nonviolent battling is the alternative to war.
I think that that is a good definition of what happens when opposing groups are battling for control of a society by democratic means, that is, by voting.
That is what will be happening in this country between now and the Nov. 4, 2008 election. The winner of this election will be in charge of the U.S. government.
III. This talk on "Moving from a war system to enduring peace" applies both to the war in Iraq and the more general problem of war, an ongoing sickness of society.
In Iraq the aim of the Bush administration to establish a democratic govern-ment where conflicts are resolved by political and judicial means is the right goal. But the unilateral military action being used to reach this goal is the wrong means.
The right means would be to use the United Nations, both to conduct the nation-building work for the government being created and to enforce agreements.
All U.S. military forces should be removed within one year and replaced by U.N. peacekeeping forces, a majority of which could come from Muslim countries. Dennis Kucinich's bill HR 1234 calls for such action, but it is being ignored by most.
Focusing on when the U.S. forces should be withdrawn instead of what is to be done at that time is a horrible mistake. Real conflicts exist, and it is necessary to create political institutions and police forces that can keep that conflict under control.
In the world as a whole there should be a shift from trying to get peace by establishing an American Empire to creating a global-level democratic government.
Americans generally don't like the idea of an American Empire controlling the whole world (the view that the present administration seems to favor), but they (and apparently most of our other national political leaders) lack a clear idea of a viable alternative for a peaceful global community.
They realize the United Nations has been a move in the right direction. It has had successes in stopping aggression, helping refugees, coordinating disaster relief, promoting human rights, advancing the adoption of treaties to deal with global problems, and making important declarations about ideals to be pursued. But they also know that in the end the U.N. is an association of national governments each of which aims to advance its own narrow national interests and to protect its national sovereignty. It lacks the structure to deal effectively with many global problems.
The answer on how to improve the U.N. lies in our own political history and in understanding the key differences between a confederation and a federation.
IV. Differences between a confederation (as the U.N.) and a federation (as the U.S.)
In a confederation member states retain all of their sovereignty, including having their own armed forces, but in a federation some matters related to the welfare of the larger community are under the control of the central government.
In a confederation member states can secede from the central organization for any reason, but in a federation secession is not permitted.
In a confederation the citizens of the member states must work through the state government and have no right to interact directly with the central govern-ment, but in a federation they have a right to interact with the central government.
In a confederation the central government can't pass laws which hold indi-viduals accountable, but in a federation the central government can pass laws that apply to individuals and take action against individual violators of those laws.
In a confederation loyalty of individuals is just to the state government, but in a federation loyalty to the central government overrides loyalty to the local state.
In a confederation all financial resources of the central government come as contributions from the member states, but in a federation the central government has its own independent sources of revenue.
V. The U.N. can become more effective if it is transformed into a world federation.
A move in this direction has been the creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC) which has authority to prosecute individuals, even national leaders, for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. You can get more information about the ICC at http://www.iccnow.org and http://www.amicc.org .
Another good action has been adoption of the "Responsibility to Protect" (R2P) principle, that if national governments don't protect the rights of their citizens other nations have a right to intervene. More info is at http://www.responsibilitytoprotect.org .
Another move in this direction would be to create a U.N. Emergency Peace Service (UNEPS) composed of individually hired persons who can respond quickly to crises. For more information about UNEPS, see http://www.globalsolutions.org/node/560 .
Another move in this direction would be the creation of a U.N Parliamentary Assembly, where elected national legislators would act as an advisory body to the General Assembly. For info on this effort, see http://www.unpacampaign.org .
For a world federation to fully succeed, loyalty to the nation-state (patriotism) will need to be subordinated to loyalty to the human community (humatriotism).
Once a democratic world federation exists, military spending would rapidly decline to zero. Laws could be enacted to eliminate all nuclear weapons and to protect the environment. It could manage the international economy and more effectively control international crime. It could govern outer space and the oceans and other parts of the world not controlled by national governments. It would be able to promote a sense of world community and could recommend that all children be taught a common global language such as Esperanto.
WFI at CGS
Information about upcoming and past WFI panels at the CGS Annual Conferences.
+ WFI at the 2009 CGS Annual Conference, Washington, DC
+ WFI at the 2007 CGS Annual Conference, Minneapolis, MN
+ WFI Forum at the 2006 CGS Annual Conference, Washington, DC
+ WFI Panel at the 2005 CGS Annual Conference, Santa Fe, NM
