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There are many areas that I have not touched on, such as whether intervention can take place in a humanitarian situation of starvation. Some people think that that is the easy and obvious case, but is it? North Korea, only two years ago, managed to starve a million of its population to death, not to mention all the other things that were happening in that tragic country. We did not intervene. Why not? We could not, because we knew that China would not let anyone intervene: it is as bald as that. Morally, the case for intervention is overwhelming. With countries such as China and South Africa with Zimbabwe, I am not sure whether, if the situation continues long enough, they will not find it necessary to intervene in much the same way that India found it necessary to intervene in what is now Bangladesh.
These are complex areas, but they are increasingly becoming the subject of the debate taking place in our various intergovernmental organisations. It is a profoundly important one for the United Nations. Although I was sad that some of the reforms being proposed recently did not get through, one of the good ones that did get through was the Peacebuilding Commission, which is a significant step forward and one that should be able to deal with this problem in a rather more developed way.
If I were looking for hopeful signs, one is that a debate is happening—and I hope that debate will happen more now after this small contribution. Also, the emerging superpowers, particularly India and Brazil, are aware of the importance of these arguments. They are certainly heavily involved in peacekeeping operations around the world, and they are struggling with the question of intervention in the same way that we are. China and Russia are much more against it, not least because of their recent history as dictatorships. Nevertheless, I am not entirely convinced, particularly if China continues as it is, that it will not find it necessary to use at least soft power to intervene, as there is evidence that it thought of doing so with Burma. Whether China will really do that, I am not sure.
However, we must be aware. We all criticise what is happening in Burma, then Burma goes quiet and we go quiet. That is inevitable, but it does not go quiet in Burma. It does not go quiet in North Korea. There is
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That is the moral case, but the moral case must then be set against what is politically realistic. In many ways, the United Nations has more legal structures to allow intervention, including criminal courts and so forth, than it gets credit for at times. The problem is that the political will to deliver the systems that are necessary to underpin it are not there. That is what my right honourable friend the Prime Minister was saying in his Mansion House speech the other day when he talked about the need for the United Nations to develop a police force for intervention after the collapse of the state. I am sure he knows this, but that is far easier said than done.
One of the arguments that troubles me most, particularly in Europe and increasingly in this country since Iraq, is the issue of moral relativism. There is a temptation, particularly on feelings about George Bush, to see the United States in the same light as an authoritarian power. We need to be clear about this. When people engage in moral relativism, they forget that in countries with an ability to change a Government from time to time—we loosely call it democracy—with a rule of law and with human rights, there is the ability to put right the wrongs. You do not have that in North Korea, Burma, Zimbabwe or wherever. That is an important fundamental and moral difference, of which we should not lose sight.
The Americans criticised us—rightly in my view—because we had interned around 1,500 people in Northern Ireland without trial, including on ships off the coast of Northern Ireland. They were right to criticise us then and we are right to criticise them now on Guantanamo Bay. We should not make the mistake of thinking that that makes them or us in the 1970s the same as the unstable dictatorships and collapsed states we are trying to deal with. It is an important issue and I hope that this discussion continues. I beg to move for Papers.
1.20 pm
Lord Avebury: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Soley, has argued elsewhere that when Britain took the lead in abolishing the international slave trade using naval power to attack, as he has explained, those who continued to engage in the trade after 1807 were engaged in a case of morality trumping the law. There were other cases in the 19th century, to some of which he has alluded also in his articles and speeches outside the House, where Britain used or threatened the use of force in support of human rights; for example, Palmerston and Don Pacifico in 1852. There was Admiral Mundy’s support for Garibaldi in the liberation of the two Sicilies. But far more often we simply denounce foreign autocrats, particularly the Ottomans, as he mentioned, for the atrocities that they committed against their Bulgarian or Armenian
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Perhaps the noble Lord would agree that the unilateral abolition of the slave trade by the United Kingdom could also be viewed as an early case of extraterritorial jurisdiction. As he explained, cases were brought in the courts. In one case, the owners of American ships that had been confiscated by the British Navy brought proceedings, but the courts, and finally the Privy Council, declared that the slave trade was prima facie illegal, and not only when it was perpetrated in territory under the control of the British empire. In our own time, there are violations of human rights which are rightly treated as matters of universal jurisdiction even if they have not been accepted as such by every member state of the United Nations. Thus, for example, indictments under the Rome Statute for offences to be dealt with by the International Criminal Court require every signatory to arrest the perpetrators and deliver them up to the jurisdiction of the court. Similarly, states are obliged to arrest and try offenders who commit acts dealt with under the Convention Against Torture or to render them up to international jurisdiction by the ICC. The fact that some acts of torture are considered lawful in the countries of origin, such as female genital mutilation or the Sharia penalty of 100 lashes for a woman who commits adultery with a married person, would not release us from the duty of trying a person who came within our jurisdiction having committed such an offence if we have got the evidence to take him or her to court.
But the existence of loathsome cultural practices, or even of endemic persecution of minorities, is not seen as crossing the threshold that would allow intervention without the use of a resolution by the Security Council. We can take it as read, I think, that it would be impossible to get agreement on an amendment of Article 2(7) of the charter, which prohibits intervention on matters that are,
But the use of the word “essentially” limits the extent of the prohibition to those matters that are not regulated by international law. The development under the UN Human Rights Commission and now the council of special procedures for monitoring and reporting on thematic human rights issues, and in a few cases the appointment of country rapporteurs, and the appointment of a High Commissioner for Human Rights, are assertions of the international community’s right to criticise and to make recommendations to states, although none of these mechanisms by itself triggers the right of an intervention.
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The Security Council has to identify the situation in question as a threat to peace under Chapter VII of the charter and only when measures not involving the use of armed force are judged or have proved to be inadequate can the Security Council authorise the use of armed force. The term “threat to the peace” is not defined, and a massive internal disturbance may have international repercussions. Inevitably, there will be situations where it is clear that an overwhelming humanitarian catastrophe is unfolding—to use the terminology that applied to Kosovo—but for political reasons it proves impossible to get a resolution through the United Nations Security Council, which was the dilemma that we faced in Kosovo, or that there may be conclusive evidence that the Security Council is unable or unwilling to act decisively against an ongoing genocide or systematic displacement of peoples. These are the difficult cases that the noble Lord invites us to consider.
Where the UN is already present in a territory, as it was in Srebrenica and Rwanda, all would agree that the power exists to reinforce the units that are there, as commanders on the spot were demanding in both those cases, and that the international community was highly culpable for the failure to avert the catastrophes that were clearly predicted; in the case of Rwanda, not only by General Dallaire, the UN commander on the spot, but a year before by the UN rapporteur on torture, Bacre Waly Ndiaye, who put it in his annual report, that this was a lead-up to a genocide. The Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, said in his report on Rwanda that what happened was,
He expressed bitter regret that more had not been done to prevent it. There was no aim to which he felt more deeply committed than enabling the UN never again to fail in protecting a civilian population from genocide or mass slaughter. The independent inquiry into the failure of the UN in Rwanda said that,
“The United Nations must be prepared .... to prevent acts of genocide or gross violations of human rights wherever they may take place. The political will to act must not be subject to different standards”.
This “duty to protect” may well have become a customary norm of international law, as the UN Secretary-General said in his address to the heads of states of the Non-Aligned Movement in September 2006. He said that the duty to protect had worked in Timor Leste, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and that it had to be made to work again if we are to avert a major crisis in Darfur. Yet this list shows that the difficult cases are the ones where the crisis occurs in a state that does not feel bound to accept the emerging consensus on the criteria that justify liberal intervention: that there is either an actual or imminent huge loss of life; that the existence of that situation has been determined objectively, particularly but not necessarily exclusively by the Security Council; and that the Security Council has not explicitly ruled out that intervention. The UN has not protected civilians in Darfur because the Security Council fell over backwards to proceed by agreement with Khartoum and has been continually blocked in its attempts first to employ a UN force, and now the hybrid force which is to deliver
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However, there were other considerations which made the case for immediate intervention problematic. It would almost certainly have meant that there would have been no comprehensive peace agreement between north and south Sudan, and there would have been colossal difficulties, both military and logistical, in mounting an operation in Darfur without the consent of the Government in Khartoum. It would probably have fractured the United Nations since it would have been implacably opposed by China, Russia and most of the developing countries, whereas now I see that the Chinese are involved in Darfur to the extent of at least supplying engineers to prepare the infrastructure for a larger deployment of peacekeepers early next year. The international community might have leant on Sudan more heavily than it did, but it is by no means certain that the human cost would have been lower in the long run if the coalition of the willing had intervened with force without the authority of the United Nations five years ago when the genocide first began. As it is, in spite of Beshir’s procrastination, the hybrid force is at last getting under way, and the main problems in 2008 are, I believe, going to be political rather than military in getting peace talks going involving the eight factions that boycotted the Libya talks, and finding ways of resettling the former Janjaweed militias into other parts of Sudan.
The same arguments would have applied to interventions between the north and the south of Sudan where the long-running civil war led to perhaps 10 times as many deaths as in the Darfur massacres, and appalling as it is to think of the deaths and suffering which were caused by those 25 years of civil war, it is not easy to be certain what would have happened if there had been a military expedition to separate the combatants and try to define the boundary between them without their agreement. The crisis on the border between Eritrea and Ethiopia shows that even when the dispute is between sovereign states, and they have ostensibly agreed on a solution and on the means of its implementation, trust can still break down and the peacekeepers will be kicked out. The comprehensive peace agreement was really a misnomer because it left the question of Abyei and other regions along the boundary unsettled, but it is infinitely better than sending a latter-day General Gordon to sort the combatants out.
That brings me to my last point. Mr David Cameron thinks that liberal intervention is the idea that we should just get out there into the world and sort it all out, showing the depth of intellectual poverty that infects the Tory party today through its leader. There are not many conflicts which demand a UK military contribution, and Mr Cameron seems to have forgotten that his party fully supported the folly of being dragged into the attack on Saddam Hussein. President Mubarak said that that operation would create 100 bin Ladens. He was out by a couple of orders of magnitude, for which the Tories have got to share the responsibility.
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But if the Tory party is now opposed to collective interventions to prevent genocide, mass slaughter, war crimes and crimes against humanity, as approved by the General Assembly in 2005, it is as out of tune with the developing norms of international law as it was with public opinion on Iraq itself. The responsibility to protect civilian populations on principles which have developed out of our experience in Rwanda, Kosovo, Bosnia and Somalia on the lines of the weighty report prepared by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty has been implicitly reaffirmed by the United Nations in establishing the hybrid force in Darfur and the multi-dimensional presence in Chad and the Central African Republic. Coupled with the equally important “responsibility to prevent”, these principles are the way towards a more civilised world in the 21st century.
1.35 pm
Lord Bew: My Lords, it is with some trepidation that I rise to support the themes of the noble Lord, Lord Soley, and I should like first to thank him for giving us the opportunity to have this debate. I listened with great attention to what he had to say and I find myself largely in agreement, although I should add that I have listened with great respect to the subtle and nuanced case just advanced by the noble Lord, Lord Avebury.
Anybody wishing to address the issue of liberal intervention in this House today knows that they are doing so in circumstances which are very difficult. The debate on this subject has gone round in a circle. In the early 1990s it was not a popular theme, and as the 1990s developed, especially in the aftermath of Bosnia and certainly in the aftermath of 9/11, the context changed. The popularity of the concept of liberal intervention probably peaked in around 2002, but at this moment it is distinctly less popular, and that is putting it mildly. These are realities that we have to accept. The most important and significant development that led to this fundamental change was undoubtedly 9/11 in terms of American attitudes. American diplomats such as Ambassador Richard Haass, who spoke of the “reluctant sheriff”, summarised a certain view of America’s role in the world in the 1990s, but inevitably found themselves uncomfortable with the direction of the Bush Administration after 2002. Those of us who wish to support the broad case and themes outlined by the noble Lord, Lord Soley, as I do, have to accept that it is much harder to do so today because of what has happened in Iraq. We also have to accept that no one on the side of those who favoured the invasion appears to have anticipated the full and appalling human cost that has been incurred.
That said, it is important to retain the argument for the disposition—in a way that is all it can be in British foreign policy—in favour of liberal interventionism rather than a selfish diplomatic nimbyism, which simply will not work because we live in a globalised context, and in any case the distinctions
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I want to say something further about the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Soley, because it allows me to make a certain point. It is sometimes assumed that those of us who wish to argue in favour of liberal intervention as a disposition—I can only describe it as such because it cannot be more than that; it is a value, because the circumstances of a situation are always extremely important—are in the same camp as those who do not realise the importance of negotiation or the importance of dialogue with opponents and enemies who may be nasty and violent. The case made by the noble Lord, Lord Soley, is illustrative of the fact that this is not true of those of us who hold this view. In 1994, at a time when the IRA was still involved in a campaign of violence, the noble Lord became involved on behalf of the Conservative Government, although then a Labour MP, in a very difficult and in some ways I think he will admit, in a treacherous dialogue with the leadership of the republican movement. Undoubtedly in the long-term he can say that it was one of those endeavours which played a role in making Northern Ireland the better place that it now is, but it was a difficult and highly ambiguous matter in which to be engaged. The role of the noble Lord, Lord Soley, in this is recorded in Julia Langdon’s biography of the late lamented Marjorie Mowlam, the former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, where much more is said about these events than I can say today.
This allows me to make the further point that it is not only those of us who favour liberal intervention who understand that in certain circumstances it may be necessary to engage in difficult, controversial and risky dialogue. But the circumstances of such a dialogue are very important. It is sometimes said—I have heard it in this House a number of times since I arrived—that the case of Northern Ireland demonstrates the need for unconditional dialogue with Hamas. There may indeed be a case for
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The discussions in which the noble Lord, Lord Soley, engaged at such risk were governed by the political conditions outlined in the Downing Street declaration of 1993, to which both the British and Irish Governments and all the parties in this House were signed up. In other words, it was a ruled and governed discussion, not a free-flowing one. It is very important to understand that there was this political context. It was not a dialogue without preconditions in that sense; political conditions and a political context existed which were very firmly in place. One might think there are certain analogies with what the quartet has outlined for the Middle East as the political conditions and contexts which might determine any possible settlement, which is devoutly wished for, in the Middle East.
So this is not only to make the point that we cannot deduce from the Northern Ireland case that free-flowing dialogue is an easy answer to our problems, as opposed to the more difficult courses associated with current foreign policy and its legacies; it is also to make the point that this particular dialogue was with a movement we now know was heavily penetrated by British intelligence, which is more than we knew then. The noble Lord, Lord Soley, now knows that one of his interlocutors in this dialogue, the chairman of Sinn Fein, Mr Donaldson—who was murdered last year by assassins unknown—was a British agent. This tells us about how murky these matters are and the scale of penetration that existed at that time. Therefore, when the British Government engaged in that dialogue, they knew a lot more about the war weariness, the scale of political ambition and so on of the republican movement than any of us who were writing about these issues at the time actually realised.
So, again, it is very difficult to extrapolate from this particular case, in the way that is so frequently done, a wider analogy as a model for world peace: that one simply puts aside one’s scruples about difficult people who are still applying violence, reaches out to them, engages them in discussion and somehow difficulties will disappear. Northern Ireland is a case on its own—I am glad to see the noble Lord, Lord Soley, agreeing with me—in which the noble Lord undoubtedly played a distinguished role.
I grew up and spent most of my adult life in Belfast when the norm for many years was car bombs and apparently incessant sectarian slaughter—not on the scale of Baghdad but on a significant scale. For many years there was a sense of normality; that this was the limit of life; that this is how things proceeded.
As to the debate on Iraq, in the United States there are the beginnings of some degree of cross-party acceptance within Congress. It is accepted, partly as a result of the work of General Patrias, already discussed in this House today, that there is the possibility that matters are easing and that outcomes may be better than they looked some months ago. We are all aware that it is only a possibility and, in some ways, only a fragile possibility. It is possible to live in a city and for one to believe that it will never end. But
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