Book Launch Protecting Civilians: The Obligations of Peacekeepers
Micheál Martin, TD, Minister for Foreign Affairs Will Launch Protecting Civilians: The Obligations of Peacekeepers by Dr Siobhán Wills (Oxford University Press)
Following the CCJHR Annual Lecture by Professor Guy Goodwin Gill In Aras na Mac Leinn at 6pm
Micheál Martin, TD, Minister for Foreign Affairs Will Launch Protecting Civilians: The Obligations of Peacekeepers by Dr Siobhán Wills (Oxford University Press)
Monday 23rd March 7pm
THE STAFF COMMON ROOM
Quad
North Wing
UCC
Professor Goodwin-Gill’s Foreword to Dr. Wills' book
Peacekeeping and peace support operations have expanded considerably in scope and purpose, particularly over the last decade and a half. The complexity and, indeed, the contradictions attaching to these initiatives are often all too apparent, as Dr Wills shows in her timely study. Alive to the issues and concerns and solidly grounded in the experience of fifty or so years of missions throughout the globe, the analysis here reveals clearly the problems and the tension that can arise between national interests, humanitarian concerns,and international law, when mandates are ill thought-out, or lacking in political commitment.
For peacekeepers are no longer, if ever they were, simply guardians of the truce or observers of the cease-fire. They are now commonly enforcers of the peace or the settlement considered essential to present and future peace. Their liability to engage in combat for that greater good necessarily puts in issue their status – which cannot be that of belligerent and perhaps ought not either to be that of occupant, even in UN-run operations of long duration, such as Kosovo.
Dr Wills identifies and analyses closely the still worrying problems of the applicable law: Whether and to what extent UN operations are bound by international humanitarian law; how, if at all, rights and duties are transmitted through the legal responsibilities of troop contributing nations; how relevant or important is the consent of the State where operations take place; and what impact does human rights law have on the conduct and accountability of States and troops.
Some of these questions have already come up before municipal courts, particularly if not exclusively in the United Kingdom. Here the House of Lords, finding jurisdiction in the fact of effective custody and control, has ruled on the extra-territorial reach of certain of the UK’s human rights obligations, as provided for domestically by the Human Rights Act 1998.
British and other military forces are even now reviewing and revising practices, training and manuals in the light of recent experience and the challenges thrown up at the sharp end, when peace support operations can call for war fighting, mediation, and civilian protection, all within a single mandate.
As Dr Wills clearly shows, it is at the point where peacekeepers enter into contact with civilians that the law – under the weight of political objectives and sometimes countervailing principles – must rise to the tasks of protection. It may be true, as she notes, that the Hague and Geneva conception of ‘occupation law’ is not obviously an appropriate setting for UNmandatedor UN-run operations with essentially humanitarian objectives. And yet, as she alsoshows, drawing on Australia’s experience in Somalia, occupation law can provide the essential legal framework within which to maintain order and security and to rebuild civilian infrastructures.
Drawing on the rich history of the present and the recent past, this study pinpoints numerous inadequacies in the mandate, objectives, and implementation of various peace support operations – inadequacies, often compounded by lack of political will and purpose, which failed to stop or to do anything to prevent, not only the atrocities in Rwanda and Srebrenica, but also the daily violence, abuse and humiliation suffered by civilians at the hands of armed forces, militias, even peacekeepers themselves.
Too often, peacekeepers have not protected the vulnerable, but have been required to look the other way, or have done so for want of clear direction. Of course, as Dr Wills explains, the nature of conflict and the type and location of combatants are forever changing, and many parties, not just non-State actors, will manoeuvre in the spaces left by ambiguity. But if the principles of the UN Charter and the underlying spirit of the law are to mean anything, then the moral and political imperative to protect civilians ought indeed to have crossed the line to legal duty. The present and continuing challenge is implementation – finding effective ways to ensure that international peacekeepers and UN operations, in all their variety, do not become abusers of those entrusted to their protection; and that any immunity from process is legitimated by openness and accountability.
This important work lays down solid foundations for that programme of action. It is essential reading for students of these critical times, it gives legal content to the rhetoric of the responsibility to protection, and it will make a substantial and positive contribution to the doctrine of peace support operations in the years to come.
Guy S. Goodwin-Gill
All Souls College
Oxford