Justice and Peace by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783658251963
Publisher: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden

6.3 The Cases: Justice Theory and the African Union’s Position on Global Protection Norms

6.3.1 The African Union and the Responsibility to Protect

As mentioned in the introduction, the African Union incorporated the idea of the responsibility to protect in its Constitutive Act as early as July 2000. Article 4(h) of this unusual document grants the Union the right to intervene during serious crises in a member state, such as defending against war crimes, genocide and human rights violations. Should unanimity minus one not be achieved, a decision to intervene is made by the AU General Assembly through a two-thirds majority vote by the member states—without the government in question holding a veto right. This indicated that the establishment of the AU in 2001 as the successor organization to the discredited Organization for African Unity (OAU) was accompanied by a normative shift from a culture of non-intervention to one of non-indifference (Murithi 2009; Williams 2007). It appeared that Africa and African states were not only accepting Western norms but also that a normative shift in the global order from one based on state sovereignty to one based on principles of liberal peace was actively being promoted by the new organization. Some observers optimistically commented that the R2P was a “norm born out of Africa” (Williams 2009, p. 397).

The AU’s acknowledgement of the responsibility to protect certainly was surprising. For one, the OAU had previously emphasized traditional principles such as non-intervention, sovereignty and uti possidetis, compromising with the power interests of African potentates. And, secondly, many African states continued to be ruled by authoritarian regimes and, due to inherent weakness and diverse internal conflicts, had the potential to quickly become the sites of serious conflicts and the targets of humanitarian intervention. By accepting the responsibility to protect and the associated dismantling of normative protections against external intervention, AU member states were willingly accepting these risks. Given the inequality between African states that were the potential objects of humanitarian protection and those states with the military capacity to intervene, this represented a dangerous gateway for external interventions on the African continent.

Consequently, article 4(h) was much debated during the founding of the AU and a number of states continue to hold a skeptical position towards the new principle. The fact that this departure from the principle of state sovereignty was successful at all is tied to the shock of the situation in Rwanda. Foreign policy elites and many African decision-makers came to two conclusions as a result of the genocide: First, a crime of this sort must never be repeated and, second, Africa could not count on the international community to take quick military action when it came to protecting the lives of Africans. Additionally, South Africa and Nigeria also actively contributed to the shift. The governments of both countries came to promote the establishment of liberal norms in the AU’s constitution based on their own convictions and on strategic calculations. Supporting the shift helped them to demonstrate the liberal leanings of their policies to both their populaces and international observers (Tieku 2004).

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