Ron Glossop's comments on Responsibility to Protect Query

[ScottLH...@gmail.com]

12 August 2008
Scott and Meghan,
I'm finally getting caught up on my e-mail messages sent during July
when I was away from home. I'm glad to see that the deadline for
responses to this message is still in the future.
Let me say that I am glad to see attention focused on the R2P
principle. Along with the ICC, it is one of the recent great steps
forward in limiting national sovereignty, the key to moving us toward
a democratic world federation. Meghan did a great job on the "primer"
paper.
(1) The current situation in Darfur makes it clear that the U.N.
needs to find a way of implementing the R2P principle when national
governments don't want it implemented. In my view, at least two
things need to be done. First, the U.N. needs its own mercenaries,
its own individually recruited volunteers ready to use military force
to carry out the policies adopted by the world community. Second,
there needs to be a way of adopting policy which cannot be stopped by
the veto of the five permanent members. When the Security Council can
agree on a policy, the policy usually cannot be implemented without
too much trouble. But another way forward is needed when the Security
Council cannot agree. In the long run, we need to modify the voting
system in both the Security Council and the General Assembly along the
lines proposed by Joseph Schwartzberg or with implementation of
Richard Hudson's Binding Triad in the General Assembly. In the short
run, another way forward may be focusing on use of the "Uniting for
Peace" resolution adopted by the General Assembly in 1950 in order to
allow for adoption of resolutions supporting U.N. peacekeeping
operations in Korea when the Soviet Union would have vetoed them in
the Security Council.
(2) The situation in Darfur does nothing to show that the R2P
principle should be abandoned. It only shows that the U.N. needs to
come up with some concrete ideas on how to implement it.
(3) Implementing the R2P principle in Iraq requires using the same
UN Volunteer Force that will be required to implement it anywhere. In
fact, having such a UN force available would make it easier to get the
U.S. and other nations to remove their military forces.
(4) There is a real dispute about using force as a way of
implementing R2P. The dispute can be overcome by developing an
acceptable voting system in the Security Council and/or General
Assembly where it will not be too easy to authorize the use of force
but also where it will not be too difficult and where the
authorization will have legitimacy, that is, it will be a reflection
of world public opinion rather than political games between national
governments.
With regard to the prevention problem, once the R2P principle gets
effectively enforced a couple of times, we can expect that the problem
of ignoring it will fade.
Ron Glossop