Un Emergency Peace Service and the Responsibility to Protect by Annie Herro

Author:Annie Herro [Herro, Annie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, General, Peace, Political Science, Security (National & International), Human Rights
ISBN: 9780415719193
Google: kRMzDAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 18607435
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-10-29T00:00:00+00:00

A representative of the Jakarta office of a prominent international NGO that deals with preventing and resolving violent conflict (who was formerly a British diplomat) cited the importance of securing the consent of the government into whose territory UNEPS would intervene. He said:

The more you flag this as a force that could get sent in regardless of the wishes of the local government, the harder I’d imagine it would be in more benign circumstances to invite them in. The UN is normally careful to badge its interventions in the most un-confrontational way possible because that maximises the chances of them being invited in.65

A respondent from the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade who served in senior positions in the Bougainville Truce and Peace Monitoring Groups and the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands, also highlighted the importance of obtaining government consent before intervening. He remarked, “[When Australia] intervenes in the region – in East Timor, Tonga, the Solomon Islands – we’ve sought government approval”.66

In fact, with the exception of the 2011 peace enforcement operation in Libya, full-scale military interventions to protect civilians have only been undertaken with host country consent or when there is no functioning government to consult such as in Somalia and Rwanda.67 Furthermore, the modest British-led intervention force in Sierra Leone (2000) and the European Union-led Operation Artemis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (2003) are just two examples that illustrate the potential value of the consent-based, short-term deployment of an international military presence to help prevent the escalation of armed conflict.68 Consent, however, is not always static, and can also be the result of coercion. For example, former Indonesian President B.J. Habibie, and his minister for defence and security (and commander-in-chief of Indonesian armed forces or TNI), General Wiranto, agreed to the peace enforcement operation, the International Force for East Timor (INTERFET), partly because of pressure from the international community.69 But even nominal consent of the host-state can serve as a safeguard against attacks on the interveners. Scholars have argued that the cooperation of the TNI with INTER-FET was a major reason behind the very low number of casualties of Australian and other foreign forces.70

This discussion highlights one of the paradoxes of a localised UNEPS proposal. The logic behind UNEPS is to create a service that would not be held hostage to the interests of member states; however, in order for UNEPS to achieve support, it might need to be contingent on UNSC authorisation. A similar process occurred when the R2P doctrine was transitioning from the ICISS report to the World Summit Outcome Document (WSOD). The ICISS report’s suggestion – that a military intervention to protect civilians might be deployed under a UNGA’s “Uniting for Peace Resolution” if the six criteria for intervention were addressed – was omitted from the WSOD and the final wording on the authority placed R2P’s coercive components firmly within the ambit of the UNSC.71

The creation of an independent funding structure for the proposed UNEPS to increase the autonomy of

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