CIAO DATE: 05/2014
A publication of:
SETA Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research
This paper examines the position of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) during the Arab revolutions of 2010-2013. In the early 1990s, the UNSC devised the doctrine of ‘humanitarian intervention’ which was premised on the view that systematic and comprehensive human rights violations within a state could pose a “threat to international peace and security.” Nevertheless, the Security Council consistently failed to act during the course of Arab uprisings due to a number of structural and procedural problems, including the primacy of national interests, permanent members’ disagreement about the meaning of ‘collective security,’ and the isolated nature of decision-making whereby the substance of major resolutions is negotiated behind closed doors.
The doctrine of ‘humanitarian intervention’, which the UNSC expounded in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War era, gave the Council new powers, inter alia, against regimes that violate human rights on a grand scale. According to Sean Murphy, humanitarian intervention can be defined as: “threat or use of force by a state, group of states, or international organization primarily for the purpose of protecting the nationals of the target state from widespread deprivations of internationally recognized human rights.” UNSC actions, known as ‘humanitarian intervention,’ stem from humanitarian considerations such as ethnic cleansing, mass murder, illegal overthrow of democratic governments, civil wars that mostly victimize civilians, and collective human suffering due to starvation. In a remarkable departure from old orthodoxies about the definition of ‘threat’ to international peace as stemming solely from military aggression, the UNSC, in a presidential statement adopted in 1992, expressed the view that: “the absence of war and military conflicts among States does not in itself ensure international peace and security. The non-military sources of instability in the economic, social, humanitarian and ecological fields have become threats to peace and security.” This meant that the essential principles of sovereignty and non-intervention would henceforward be cast aside in the pursuit of greater human rights protection, thus reflecting the general progress of international law in the direction of individual human rights and human security at the expense of the firmly established principle of ‘state sovereignty.’ The weakening of the considerations of sovereignty, at least theoretically, could justify UN sanctioned offensives against mass killings, war crimes or illegal overthrow of elected governments with bloody consequences. Indeed, by virtue of a series of resolutions originating in an expanded definition of Article 39 of the UN Charter concerning threats to international peace and security, the Council has since authorized numerous military interventions in response to humanitarian crisis which have been essentially ‘domestic’ in nature. These include interventions into Somalia (1992), Haiti (1994), Libya (2011), South Sudan (2011) and Côte d’Ivoire (2011). However, the UNSC’s performance since the endorsement of the doctrine of humanitarian intervention has not been consistent. Although scores of resolutions were passed by the UNSC condemning Serb aggression against the recognized state of Bosnia in April 1992, members of the Council with military muscle refrained, for instance, from protecting ‘safe havens’ like Sarajevo, Bihac and Tuzla from Serb attacks. Up until the commission of genocide in Srebrenica in July 1995, when 8,000 Bosnians were wiped out by the Serb forces, the UNSC opted for a non-committal posture in the face of a long list of ‘war crimes’ and ‘crimes against humanity’ committed in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995, representing one of the low points for the UN.