In an article in this morning's Guardian David Clark laments the current 'paralysis and inaction' over Darfur. In the course of his argument he says this:
Splitting hairs over the definition of genocide or quibbling over how many thousands have been killed doesn't alter the fact that serious crimes against humanity are being committed with every passing day. Nor does the argument that the militias are beyond Khartoum's control. Disputes about whether the regime is orchestrating the violence or has simply lost control of events are unimportant when set against the suffering in Darfur. States that fail to protect the human rights of their own citizens forfeit the sovereign right to non-interference in their internal affairs. Without that principle, the universal declaration of human rights isn't worth the paper it's written on.The italics in the last two sentences have been added by me. Please read those two sentences again. Think about what they imply. One of the things I'd say they imply is that if the threshold for intervention in such states as Clark there characterizes is set enormously high, so that outside intervention is justified only when there is a massive and ongoing humanitarian crisis, the universal declaration of human rights won't be worth the paper it's written on. States in the business of killing, torturing, raping (and so forth) 'merely' to the tune of a few hundreds, or maybe thousands, of people a year, or states with an even more terrible record than this but where some of the terribleness lies a little way back in time, won't have forfeited their 'sovereign right' to non-interference in their affairs.
Almost exactly a year ago today, Clark had a piece in the Guardian on the question of humanitarian intervention in relation to the Iraq war (and discussed by me in the post Humanitarian Intervention - old site, August 12). Clark's opposition to the war was based in part precisely on invoking that kind of enormously high threshold:
The Iraqi regime was certainly vile, and had the case for intervention been made when Saddam Hussein was gassing his own people it would have been a strong one indeed. But there was no immediate crisis to be averted in 2003.I'd say, therefore, that David Clark is between a rock and another rock. Obviously, not every human rights violation can justify external intervention in a state's affairs on humanitarian grounds; not if the principle of national sovereignty is to count for anything (as I have argued before it must). But if a regime as vile and murderous as Saddam's wasn't vile or murderous enough, then in Clark's own words:
[T]he universal declaration of human rights isn't worth the paper it's written on.Yet it's an important - a precious - document, its content to be fought for through everything, despite everything. So we need a better threshold; better than the one lately defended by Kenneth Roth for Human Rights Watch and leaned on by some left and liberal opponents of the regime-change war in Iraq for their greater comfort. I have suggested an alternative threshold here.
In today's article David Clark also proposes that, where the use of military force is concerned, the locus of decision-making power in the UN needs to be shifted from the Security Council to the General Assembly. He says:
The general assembly has its problems, but is a far more representative body than the security council and is becoming more so with the passage of time.I agree with the bit saying the general assembly 'has its problems'. Otherwise I'd reckon the whole organization needs more far-reaching reform before a proposal like this one could be looked on favourably. I don't have a prospectus for that far-reaching reform, but one thing it would need to embody is the principle that states which widely and wantonly violate human rights get to have less of a voice on topics pertaining to human rights.
