13:05 Gulf News: Humanity above borders – we all have a moral obligation to protect fellow human beings.
13:05 Udo Braendle: My approach is: It is possible to believe in universal human rights, but also in national sovereignty. Sovereignty and universal human rights are two separate issues. Yes, we do have a moral obligation. But a justification of intervention does not logically follow from human rights, even if those rights are violated.
13:09 Taufiq Rahim: I’m in favour of humanitarian intervention when the appropriate conditions are met under the United Nations Responsibility to Protect (R2P) framework. The first level of protection comes at the community level. When that fails, it is the responsibility of the government to step in to provide the necessary protection of human rights — social, economic, and political. Finally, if the government becomes negligent in ensuring that protection or, in fact, is complicit in violations, than the international community has an obligation to intervene if they constitute mass and sustained violations.
13:12 Udo Braendle: The levels make sense, as we see levels of sovereignty: formal sovereignty versus operational sovereignty. But the problem remains - how to intervene? I assume it is a question of separate steps, separate events, which need separate moral justification.
13:14 Taufiq Rahim: I think most people would feel that there are certain obligations under not just various agreements like the UN Charter or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that mandate the international community to ensure things like genocide do not occur. The issue becomes how and when to act on that, like Udo says. More often the system fails to work properly, either resulting in non-intervention as in the case of the Rwandan genocide or partisan or politicised intervention as in the case of Iraq under the guise of humanitarian intervention (ex-post facto).
13:18 Gulf News: National sovereignty ends when human rights are consistently violated.
13:19 Taufiq Rahim: Acts of multiple and sustained war crimes, campaign of ethnic cleansing, or an impending or ongoing genocide would constitute legitimate, just cause to intervene.
13:19 Udo Braendle: Following German philosopher Immanuel Kant, I think it needs to be a creative tension between sovereignty and protecting human rights.
13:21 Taufiq Rahim: The violation of human rights is too fluid a term and could be used as a pretext to undermine the sovereignty of the vast majority of nations on the planet, leading to complete state breakdown and failure. For example, the international community is not intervening in North Korea, which is likely the most egregious violator of human rights in the world on an ongoing basis and the last totalitarian regime on Earth.
13:21 Udo Braendle: I think we need to have such a dynamic. And there are several examples for this. We live in an inter-dependent world.
13:22 Taufiq Rahim: So, the threshold is quite high in the dynamic that Udo describes.
13:24 Udo Braendle: The dynamics may actually be slow — maybe in certain cases too slow — but it will always be a dynamics involving both, sovereignty and human rights. And coming from Europe, a good example would be the European Union itself. The development of the EU — with its roots in the European Steel and Coal Community, evolving to the Treaty of Rome’s European Economic Community, and finally to the current European Union, it seems to exemplify the kind of evolution Kant had in mind.
13:24 Taufiq Rahim: As I mentioned, the ‘cause’ must be more than simply violating human rights but a more unique and systemic set of war crimes, ethnic cleansing, or genocide — impending or ongoing. Beyond this, the only international framework — Responsibility to Protect — established around this, has five other dimensions to weigh: right intention; final resort; legitimate authority; proportional means; and reasonable prospect for success. It means that even if there is cause to intervene, it still doesn’t mean you do unless other things are in place. Otherwise, it could be counter-productive.
13:26 Gulf News: National sovereignty is above all – any violation of it would only result in anarchy.
13:32 Taufiq Rahim: It is an important question and no intervention is perfect. However, I would argue the intervention in Bosnia, while too little and too late, still prevented the loss of human life. In addition, India’s intervention during Bangladesh’s war for independence was crucial to ending war crimes there. I would argue that the UN intervention in Libya in a situation that was already anarchic resulted in the prevention of a massacre in Benghazi although the jury is still out there. The situation in Syria is extremely precarious. It is quite clear that there are systematic war crimes being committed there. The question there is, if there is intervention, how does it occur and who carries it out.
