Two decades ago, leaders from around the world had a moment of reckoning. The images and news reports of genocide in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia were still fresh memories, and many countries recognized they hadn’t done enough to respond or prevent the violence. So diplomats at the United Nations had a bold idea. That countries have a collective responsibility to protect their people from war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. This responsibility includes using diplomatic, humanitarian, and other peaceful means to help each country protect its own citizens, but nations also agreed that they were “prepared to take collective action” when peaceful means prove inadequate and national authorities fail to act.
Today, the responsibility to protect, or R2P as it’s often called, is being tested as mass atrocities occur around the world – from Ukraine to Myanmar to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But, whose responsibility it is to protect – or act – is uncertain.
Even at the U.N., no clear direction has emerged. In June, the U.N.’s top official on R2P, George Okoth-Obbo, said he would resign from his role as Special Advisor after just 17 months. Okoth-Obbo isn’t alone. The previous two R2P Special Advisors left after less than 3 years. The Special Advisor’s short tenure leaves people facing atrocity crimes without an ally and advocate at the U.N.
Joining the show to discuss the R2P Special Advisor’s role, and why the office has seen so much turnover, is Rebecca Barber. Up until recently Rebecca was a research fellow at the Asia Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, and she is also an honorary senior research fellow at the University of Queensland.
Show Notes:
Two decades ago, leaders from around the world had a moment of reckoning. The images and news reports of genocide in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia were still fresh memories, and many countries recognized they hadn’t done enough to respond or prevent the violence. So diplomats at the United Nations had a bold idea. That countries have a collective responsibility to protect their people from war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. This responsibility includes using diplomatic, humanitarian, and other peaceful means to help each country protect its own citizens, but nations also agreed that they were “prepared to take collective action” when peaceful means prove inadequate and national authorities fail to act.
Today, the responsibility to protect, or R2P as it’s often called, is being tested as mass atrocities occur around the world – from Ukraine to Myanmar to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But, whose responsibility it is to protect – or act – is uncertain.
Even at the U.N., no clear direction has emerged. In June, the U.N.’s top official on R2P, George Okoth-Obbo, said he would resign from his role as Special Advisor after just 17 months. Okoth-Obbo isn’t alone. The previous two R2P Special Advisors left after less than 3 years. The Special Advisor’s short tenure leaves people facing atrocity crimes without an ally and advocate at the U.N.
Joining the show to discuss the R2P Special Advisor’s role, and why the office has seen so much turnover, is Rebecca Barber. Up until recently Rebecca was a research fellow at the Asia Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, and she is also an honorary senior research fellow at the University of Queensland.
Show Notes:
Paras Shah: Two decades ago, leaders from around the world had a moment of reckoning. The images and news reports of genocide in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia were still fresh memories, and many countries recognized they hadn’t done enough to respond or prevent the violence. So diplomats at the United Nations had a bold idea — that countries have a collective Responsibility to Protect their people from war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. This responsibility includes using diplomatic, humanitarian, and other peaceful means to help each country protect its own citizens, but nations also agreed that they were “prepared to take collective action” when peaceful means prove inadequate and national authorities fail to act.
Today, the Responsibility to Protect, or R2P as it’s often called, is being tested as mass atrocities occur around the world — from Ukraine to Myanmar to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But, whose responsibility it is to protect, to act, is uncertain.
Even at the U.N., no clear direction has emerged. In June, the U.N.’s top official on R2P, George Okoth-Obbo, said he would resign from his role as Special Advisor after just 17 months. Okoth-Obbo isn’t alone. The previous two R2P Special Advisors left after less than 3 years. The Special Advisor’s short tenure leaves people facing atrocity crimes without an ally and advocate at the U.N.
This is the Just Security podcast. I’m your host, Paras Shah.
Joining the show to discuss the R2P Special Advisor’s role, and why the office has seen so much turnover, is Rebecca Barber. Up until recently, Rebecca was a research fellow at the Asia Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, and she is also an honorary senior research fellow at the University of Queensland.
Hi, Rebecca, thanks so much for joining the show. We're so glad to have you on.
Rebecca Barber: Thank you. Pleasure to be here.
Paras: To get us started, can you explain what the Responsibility to Protect is? How did it start?
Rebecca: The Responsibility to Protect is a political principle that was agreed by states in a U.N. General Assembly Resolution, the General Assembly's World Summit outcome resolution in 2005. In that resolution, states agreed that each state had the Responsibility to Protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, collectively, atrocity crimes. And so that responsibility also entailed the prevention of those crimes. So it's also agreed in that resolution that the international community should help states to exercise their Responsibility to Protect and also that the international community has a responsibility to use diplomatic, humanitarian, and other peaceful means to help protect populations from atrocity crimes. And they said that they were prepared to take collective action in a timely and decisive manner through the U.N. Security Council.
Paras: After 2005, the next big update to R2P came in 2009.
Rebecca: In 2009, the U.N. Secretary-General issued a report titled, “Implementing the Responsibility to Protect,” and in that report, he proposed that the R2P be understood as comprising three pillars — Pillar one, the responsibility of states to protect their own populations from atrocity crimes; pillar two, international assistance and capacity building, and pillar three, timely and decisive response. Those three pillars are now very much part of our understanding of the R2P. The third pillar — timely and decisive response by the international community when states fail — has very much come to dominate the discourse about their Responsibility to Protect, to the extent that their Responsibility to Protect is often understood as being primarily about international intervention.
But international intervention is not the core of Responsibility to Protect, the most important part of the R2P is the responsibility of states to protect their own populations from atrocity crimes, ideally by building societies in which atrocities are unlikely ever to occur. And then following that, the responsibility of all states to assist and encourage or persuade other states to honor their Responsibility to Protect. So it's not to say that the possibility of intervention shouldn't be part of the R2P. But rather just that, it's almost never what we're talking about when we talk about what the Responsibility to Protect requires and states.
Paras: Why is R2P important to talk about now at this moment in 2023?
Rebecca: So why it's important is fundamentally that atrocity crimes are being committed around the world at a horrifying scale in Afghanistan, Syria, Myanmar, Ukraine, of course, and many other places that are not necessarily making these headlines. The Responsibility to Protect principle was adopted in response to situations such as the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia, when the international community stood by and did nothing in the face of abundant warnings that genocide was going to be committed. And it reflected a commitment on the part of the international community that that sort of inaction in response to crimes of that magnitude would never happen again. And that principle, that idea that mass atrocities must be met with a response, is as much needed today as it was at the time of the Rwandan genocide.
The Responsibility to Protect has gained a political momentum that we can't afford to lose. Since 2005, the Responsibility to Protect has been endorsed in more than 100 U.N. resolutions. 56 states are members of the R2P group of friends. And every year when the General Assembly debates the Responsibility to Protect many states speak out in support of their principle, and express their frustration that we're not doing a better job of implementing it. So there is a lot of political momentum around the Responsibility to Protect. But what is needed is a very senior U.N. official to seize that momentum and drive it forward, and also to bring others on board. And that's the role of the R2P Special Advisor.
Paras: What is that role?
Rebecca: So when the position of the R2P Special Advisor was first established by the UN Secretary-General into government, it was to advance the conceptual political and institutional development and further refinement of the R2P principle. So in other words, it was established initially as a normative, not an operational role. That was a reflection of the fact that at the time, there was a perception that some states were unsure what they thought about the Responsibility to Protect, and it led to the Security Council regarding the appointment of the first special adviser. The Secretary-General explained that in recognition of the fledgling nature of agreement on the Responsibility to Protect, the Special Advisors’ primary roles will be conceptual development and consensus building. There was an expectation that the role would evolve over time, and that future Special Advisors could be expected to gradually assume a more operational role.
But that actually never happened, and in the Secretary-Generals’ letters of appointment of successive Special Advisors, the role of the Special Advisor has been described in exactly the same terms. I should explain what I mean when I say an operational role. This could entail a number of things, but primarily, I'm talking about what I think can broadly be termed preventive diplomacy. So engaging with and finding ways to influence government officials who are playing a role in the committing of atrocity crimes, or who might be weighing up the costs and benefits of committing atrocities, or engaging with stakeholders that can influence the perpetrators, or would be perpetrators of atrocity crimes. This might mean making the perpetrators of atrocity cons aware of the UN's interest and engagement in a situation offering ways out or bringing stakeholders together, or any other form of diplomatic influence seen as a situation demands.
Paras: And the current special adviser is George Okoth-Obbo. What is his background, and what has his tenure in this position been like?
Rebecca: So, George Okoth-Obbo came to the position of R2P Special Advisor after a very long career in the U.N., mostly with UNHCR, the U.N. Refugee Agency. He began his young career in the 1980s as a protection officer in Botswana, and over the next 30 years held progressively senior positions with UNHCR in Africa and Geneva. In 2015, he was appointed as UNHCR’s Assistant Commissioner for Operations, and he held that position until I think about 2019. The current U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was formerly the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. So he was Okoth-Obbo’s boss in UNHCR.
Following his career with UNHCR itself, Okoth-Obbo was appointed by the U.N. Secretary-General to be the head of the Secretariat of the Secretary General's high level panel on internal displacements. And then following assignments, Okoth-Obbo had thought that he had reached the end of his own career and had been finding a peaceful retirement with family in Uganda, but was approached by Secretary-General Guterres to take up the position of R2P Special Advisor and he accepted that appointment.
Paras: Last month, he actually tendered his resignation after just 17 months in the role. So what's his time in that position been like?
Rebecca: Yeah, Okoth-Obbo faced many, many challenges in his role. I think there's two overarching issues. One is the position of the R2P Special Advisor within the U.N. Joint Office for the Prevention of Genocide and the Responsibility to Protect, and the second is the nature of the mandate that's given to the R2P Special Advisor.
So to start with the first of these, the R2P Special Advisor sits within the UN Office for Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect. That office is headed by the Secretary-General Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide, who reports directly to the Secretary-General. The R2P Special Advisor has less senior status and reports to the Special Advisor for the Prevention of Genocide. The R2P Special Advisor has no dedicated budget or staff that his or her own.
You might think that this wouldn't be a problem, because surely the R2P and the genocide prevention mandate holders are working towards essentially the same goal. But in fact, in the current politics of the office, and within the U.N., the R2P mandate is seen as undermining political, and perhaps more importantly, financial support for the less politically sensitive genocide prevention mandate. The genocide prevention mandate is less politically sensitive because it focuses only on prevention, sso things like combating hate speech and discrimination, unlike the Responsibility to Protect, and is seen as not having intervention components, which is of course the controversial part of the Responsibility to Protect. So what that means is that within the joint office, the R2P mandate holder is not really encouraged to proactively engage in promoting the Responsibility to Protect, in other words, is not really encouraged to proactively do his or her job at all.
And second, overarching challenges, what I talked about earlier, which is the fact that the mandate of the R2P Special Advisor focuses on the conceptual and normative development of the Responsibility to Protect rather than actually engaging with and seeking to influence government authorities or other relevant stakeholders with regards to actual atrocity crimes situations.
Paras: The Special Advisor's limited role, and its focus on the concept of R2P, rather than practical implementation, can be a tricky diplomatic dance.
Rebecca: Earlier this year, the Asia Pacific Center for the Responsibility to Protect organized a series of meetings with the Special Advisor in Jakarta with very high level ASEAN government stakeholders, including with the U.N. Secretary-General. The Special Advisor in those meetings found himself in a very awkward situation of trying to subtly influence with regards to actual situations, primarily, atrocities being committed in Myanmar, but at the same time trying to respect the limits of his mandates, and communicate that he wasn't actually authorized to speak for the Secretary-General or indeed for the U.N. at all on any actual atrocities situations. And it was such a missed opportunity, and I think hinted at what the role could be, and could potentially achieve if the mandate were only strengthend.
Paras: As you mentioned, there are these two problems. One is on the operational side, and one is on the side of the actual scope of the mandate, and that has led to the past several Special Advisors having a short 10 years in office — and what are the consequences of that for the R2P?
Rebecca: I think the main consequences of the short tenures of the Special Advisors is the reduced ability of the Special Advisors to build up relationships with those that the Special Adviser might hope to influence on actual atrocity crime situations, and also a reduced ability to build relationships with other actors who are engaged in the work of atrocity prevention. So that might include governments, regional organizations, national or regional human rights Commissions, civil society, a range of other actors that the Special Advisor might might seek to engage with.
I've mentioned the meetings that we organized for the Special Advisor with ASEAN and with Indonesian government stakeholders, and with representatives of No Nation States. Those meetings really just felt like initial relationship-building meetings. It was wonderful to be able to build those relationships. But for the Special Advisor to actually take that forward and engage and influence and offer support would really take many more meetings. And I think that's something that would require a Special Advsior being in place for more than 18 months.
Paras: You discuss this in your Just Security piece. But what are the solutions here, what needs to change?
Rebecca: I think first and foremost, the Special Advsior’s mandate needs to be strengthened, so that the Special Advisor can leave the office, conduct field missions, speak with authority for the Secretary-General, and engage in the actual work of preventive diplomacy, whatever that requires in response to particular situations.
I think the advisors should be paid, should be properly salaried, a full-time position with budget and staff, financial support, and be based in New York to facilitate high-level engagement with diplomatic missions to the U.N. And perhaps, most importantly, of all, the Special Advisor and the Responsibility to Protect more broadly needs the political support of the U.N. internally. That means the support of the Secretary-General and support within the Joint Office for Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect.
Paras: Rebecca, you've given a lot for us to think about. Thank you so much for joining the show, and everyone should read your Just Security piece, which goes into more detail on the R2P Special Advisor. And we'll be covering these issues at Just Security as well.
Rebecca: Thank you very much for having me.
Paras: This episode was hosted by me, Paras Shah. It was edited and produced by Tiffany Chang, Michelle Eigenheer, and Clara Apt. Our theme song is “The Parade” by Hey Pluto.
Special thanks to Rebecca Barber. You can read Rebecca’s analysis of U.N. support for the R2P on our website. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five star rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.