|
|
|
|
  |
 |
 |
 |
|  | Liaison Newsletter > LIAISON-Canada Electronic Newsletter #3
States Without Law Peace-keeping, as the UN’s involvement in the former Yugoslavia has demonstrated with frightening clarity, has become a messy business. The old idea that peace-keepers and aid agencies can simply march into conflict situations, stop the fighting and the bleeding, and march out again has become painfully outdated. From Rwanda to Cambodia to Haiti, it is now recognized that the re-establishment of stable and sustainable political structures is the key to preventing war-torn societies from slipping back into conflict. So in the space of a few short years, the world has moved from traditional peace-keeping, with the relatively modest goal of keeping warring factions apart, to complex humanitarian interventions where the UN has become enmeshed in all of the machinery of government. Yet as the major United Nations interventions of the past five years have shown, the gap between the theory and the practice of helping societies re-build themselves remains wide. On December 9, the University of British Columbia’s Green College hosted a day-long seminar on the role of the international community in restoring order to so-called “failed states”. Organized by the Canadian Committee for the Fiftieth Anniversary of the UN and UBC’s International Centre for Criminal Law Reform and Criminal Justice Policy, the seminar attracted a broad array of legal and strategic thinkers who analysed lessons from the past and proposed ideas for the future. Among the key issues discussed at the seminar: The prospects of a UN rapid reaction force as a crisis response mechanism. Gregory Wirick, a UN reform consultant for the Canadian Committee for UN/50, argued that despite the clear need for a UN rapid reaction capacity, most UN member states remain content to deal with crises on an ad hoc basis. UN initiative may be further hindered, Wirick argued, by the sour mood at the UN at the end of the Organization’s 50th Anniversary, a result of a crippling financial crisis, a belligerent US Congress, and a series of high-profile failures in Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda. The evolving role of humanitarianism as a principle of international relations. Despite the best intentions, the record of humanitarian intervention over the past five years has been uneven at best. Nancy Gordon, Care Canada’s Deputy Executive Director, said that while humanitarian intervention is increasingly seen as a legitimate response to gross violations of human rights, it is no replacement for political efforts to resolve crises. She also noted some of the unforeseen consequences of humanitarian interventions, such as the emergence of the "permanent emergency", where aid is becoming increasingly integrated into the dynamics of conflict, and growing incidences of shared sovereignty, where non-governmental organizations are taking over responsibilities that national governments are unable or unwilling to fulfill. The potential of "generic justice systems" in restoring judicial order in states emerging from conflict. The situation in Rwanda, where 57,000 people still await trial on genocide charges in a state whose legal system remains incapable of coping with even "garden-variety" crimes, provided the case study for this discussion. William Schabas of the University of Montreal’s Faculty of Law argued that a specialized justice system, stripped down to basic, universal principles of justice, may be the only solution for Rwanda. He warned, however, that some trade-off between justice and reconciliation may be necessary if Rwanda is to put its bloody war behind it and move on with democratic development. The full text of the UBC Conference Report, as well as two background papers on UN rapid reaction and humanitarian intervention, are available through the UNA-Canada National Office at a cost of $3 each. |
