Lloyd Axworthy is a former foreign minister of Canada.
Louise Arbour is a distinguished Canadian whose views generally merit respect. But her recent public denunciations of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) are ill-founded, based on faulty information and questionable assessments.
In reality, both the ICC and R2P are innovative international efforts that aim to advance the rule of law and the protection of civilians – goals widely supported by most Canadians and desperately important in promoting a more humane world. They are not the failures she proclaims.
Perhaps Ms. Arbour's peripheral involvement in the creation of both the court and R2P has led to her misunderstandings. She played little role in the Canadian effort to negotiate the Rome Statute, which brought the court into being. The heavy lifting was done by a consortium of skilled Canadian diplomats, working with like-minded allies and deeply committed NGOs.
Nor was she involved in the development of R2P, a concept that arose from the international intervention in Kosovo – an initiative that stopped the mass killing and expulsions of tens of thousands. In its aftermath, Canada established an international commission to consider how better to respond to atrocities perpetrated by governments. The result was R2P, later adopted by world leaders at a UN summit in 2005 through skillful Canadian diplomacy.
Ms. Arbour now seems to insist that these hard-won gains in establishing rules and practices to protect civilians from mass atrocity and in building an international criminal justice system must be replaced by "empathy." But to abandon the court and R2P in favour of a "feeling" would replace norms and standards with kindly thoughts to the detriment of those whose lives often depend on a rules-based system.
One very positive consequence of the court and R2P is an evolving set of international norms based on the "human security" of individuals, rather than the "national security" of states. Just recently we marked the 20th anniversary of the massacre at Srebrenica, when UN peacekeepers stood by while 10,000 Bosnians were murdered. At the time, peacekeepers had no mandate to protect people. A year earlier, in Rwanda, they did not show up at all.
That has now changed. Peacekeepers on UN missions around the world are actively protecting people, embodying the R2P principles. In the Central African Republic, a UN-mandated force of African and French troops has forestalled what was ominously emerging as a genocide. In Mali, a partnership under the UN mandate of African and European peacekeepers has pushed back an extremist faction that was threatening mass murder.
Of course, the great tragedy of Syria arising from the Security Council stalemate demonstrates that R2P cannot provide a solution in every case. No one can reasonably claim that it is a panacea. And the Syrian catastrophe says more about the weakness of current political leaders and the breakdown of international consensus than it does about the soundness of R2P.
Nor can the abandonment of R2P be justified based on the chaos that followed the Libyan intervention. There are, to be sure, lessons to be learned about how interventions, on those rare occasions when they are authorized, should be conducted and followed up. But Ms. Arbour should not doubt that Moammar Gadhafi would have made good on his threat to slaughter tens of thousands in Benghazi, had the intervention not occurred.
We have work to do in improving the implementation of R2P. As I witnessed in a recent sojourn to the UN, there are efforts under way to reform and enhance UN capacities for peacekeeping, and for rebuilding failed states.
R2P remains alive and well and has achieved much in its short 10 years. I believe that is so because it is broadly recognized as the most humane and effective way to muster a collective response to the worst kinds of conscience-shocking crimes.
As for the ICC, there is a renewed sense of purpose with its changed leadership. The new chief justice is a widely respected, highly capable woman, as is the new chief prosecutor. Each has already taken steps to strengthen international support for the ICC's crucial role of bringing to justice those who commit crimes against humanity. No longer do the powerful have immunity from prosecution.
It is disappointing that Louise Arbour has lost faith in these efforts to reform international institutions at a time when there is a need for strong voices in their support.