Canada in the World: Canadian International Policy

Video Interview Thomas Franck Subscribe to eNewsletter and/or Email Alerts and Podcasts

Video Interview

Note: The opinions presented are not necessarily those of the Government of Canada.

Responsibility to Protect: A new way of thinking	3 min 27 sec	Windows Media l Quicktime
The “vessel half-empty, half-full” debate	3 min 44 sec	Windows Media l Quicktime
Modernizing the Security Council	2 min 52 sec	Windows Media l Quicktime
The challenges of UN reforms	2 min 15 sec	Windows Media l Quicktime

Responsibility to Protect: A new way of thinking

I am Thomas Franck. I am a graduate of the University of British Columbia. I teach International Law and have taught at New York University for almost 50 years and also I have taught at Cambridge, Stanford, and Osgoode Hall at York University in Toronto. I argue cases before the World Court, and I have been an ad hoc judge at the World Court. I’m currently a judge in a Law of the Seas case between Guyana and Suriname, and I write books on international law.

I don’t think that we are really talking about a new legal norm; we are talking about a new way of thinking about humanitarian disasters and egregious violations of human rights. You have to remember that the world is still a world of sovereign states and that states are very jealous of their sovereignty. On the other hand, there is a widespread understanding that when conditions in a state deteriorate to the point where very large numbers of the population are being killed—either in civil war or in a genocidal policy of the government of that state—that to stand by and do nothing is highly immoral, and being highly immoral should be illegal.

The problem is that to do anything about a situation of that sort mostly involves having to use force—that is, the outside world having to use force, in a situation where the government of that state has not invited that use of force and in some situations where the use of force would be against the very government of that state. In those situations, you have a direct clash between humanitarian law, humanitarian concepts and human rights, on the one hand, and notions of sovereignty on the other. And that has been a fierce but largely sterile debate.

What the Canadian government has done by introducing the notion of a responsibility to protect is to try to change the terms of that discourse. So you are no longer talking about humanitarian interventions as such, with all its overtones of invading sovereign states. But instead you are talking about a responsibility of the international community as a whole to take effective action (whatever form that might take) to prevent massive loss of life within a state, either in a situation of civil war or in a situation of large-scale oppression. And by changing the terms of the discourse, then we might make a move towards designing new rules.

The “vessel half-empty, half-full” debate

There is a debate which needs to be addressed in this difficult period for the United Nations. It’s a “vessel half-empty, half-full” debate. With all of the imperfections of the UN system, are we extremely lucky to have it and to have had it actually function for more than 60 years? And should we, as some people say, be celebrating the fact that there have not been more wars? It is not as if there could not have been more wars. There certainly could have been many more wars between many more countries, which have not occurred as a result of various initiatives taken under the aegis of the UN system. Should we be celebrating that and saying that is the best we can do—there are a lot of problems we can’t solve, but let’s be glad that there are some that the human system can manage to redress?

The other way to look at it is to say that the glass is half-empty. The system has failed to provide what it promised to provide, and that is the right of people everywhere to live their lives free of the shadow of war. The shadow of war is deepening, weapons are getting worse, delivery systems are becoming more efficient, and increasingly it seems countries are taking the law into their own hands and acting outside the UN system to pursue their national objectives. Therefore, the faith in the system is eroding and as the faith in the system is eroding it is becoming less and less able to handle the kinds of problems that it should be addressing. Therefore, radical change is required, or we should get rid of it and invent something else.

What would that something else look like? Well, it has been proposed that there should instead be a new association of like-minded democracies that would act in the interests of democracy and human rights, deploying force when they felt that it would be useful to deploy force, and just get rid of the UN system. Those are thoughts that are in the minds of policymakers today.

I think, on the whole, the consensus is still that we are relatively lucky to have the UN that we have; that if we had to try to invent it today, we would probably end up inventing something less efficient rather than more efficient. And that there are certainly possibilities for creating ancillary institutions—as, for example, NATO was created and the African Union was created—which could cooperate with the UN and make the whole system more effective through the “subsidiarity” that those organizations might enjoy, or the way they might cooperate with the UN to handle problems on a regional basis. These are all things that are important; they are being thought about. And the problems will never be solved, but the process of thinking about them leads to innovations, leads to incremental improvements, and that is a lot to be grateful for.

Modernizing the Security Council

The Security Council, like all parts of the UN system, is a creature designed at San Francisco in 1945 (and before that at Dumbarton Oaks in 1943). It was highly responsive to the conditions of the time and to the possibilities that were available at the time, but it is no longer responsive to many modern circumstances.

A good example is the development of weapons of mass destruction. The Charter of the United Nations says that states renounce the right to use force except when there has been an armed attack. In anything less than a situation of armed attack, if there is a need for collective action, the Charter says the decisions must be taken by the Security Council. Well, since 1945 there have been enormous developments both in weapons of mass destruction and in delivery systems, and it is not really rational to expect a state to wait for an actual armed attack to respond to that attack or to anticipate that attack and take action.

So the Charter seems to require something that is absurd, which is that you cannot respond to a nuclear attack when you can see the nuclear package being loaded onto hostile rockets on the other side of the border. You have to wait for the rockets to actually strike. That’s not rational. The Charter does provide that if you see nuclear weapons being loaded onto a rocket on the other side of the border; you can go to the Security Council and you can ask the Security Council to do something through collective measures. It—and not you, the potential victim—then has the right to act.

But the Security Council, because of the veto, has too often failed to act in situations where it has been asked to anticipate a disaster, such as the one in Rwanda, for example. So there is a need to do something about the abuse of the veto, and to limit the veto. There are various suggestions afoot as to how that problem might be addressed, but everybody agrees that the problem needs to be addressed.

The challenges of UN reforms

The Secretary-General has very wide responsibility, but he has very limited authority. Many of the kinds of administrative decisions that in a sovereign state like Canada would be made by the Cabinet or the head of a department, in the UN have to be referred back to the General Assembly. Which would be like referring back to Parliament the question of whether to buy a new photocopying machine and who to hire for an empty position. Altogether too often in the UN, those kinds of decisions—instead of being left to the administrators, to the top officials—are micromanaged by members of the General Assembly who want somebody from their state to be hired or want a photocopier to be purchased from their manufacturers. So there is a lot of micromanagement going on, and something has to be done about empowering the people with responsibility to actually have the authority to make the decisions. That is just one example of the many challenges to reform. There will be a new Secretary-General elected this fall and there is quite a bit riding on that, because reform sometimes means writing new rules and procedures, but sometimes it just means having new people at the top who can generate new ideas and bring them into being.

The UN undoubtedly has had an extremely difficult period, and it is far from clear to me that it’s a sure thing that it is going to flourish. But it is a sure thing that reforms are needed. It remains to be seen whether they’re made. 

Last Updated:2006-11-10

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