Source: UN News Centre
Innocents worldwide continue to be deliberately violated, Secretary-General says during Security Council open debate on civilian protection. Human Rights Commissioner, Assistant Secretary-General Among Speakers Stressing Need for Accountability, Redress for Victims.

Women, girls, boys and men in conflicts around the world continued to be subjected to blatant and frequent violations of international human rights and humanitarian law, not because they were “collateral damage”, but because they were deliberately targeted, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told the Security Council today.

“All of us share a fundamental responsibility to do more to protect civilians caught up in the horrors of war,” he said at the outset of a day-long open debate on protection of civilians in armed conflict. “Protection is essential, yet we must not lose sight of the need to address the causes of conflict, not just its symptoms,” he emphasized.

Ultimately, however, only political solutions could end and prevent the vast majority of conflicts while ensuring the safety and well-being of those who would otherwise bear the brunt, he said. Underscoring the need to ensure enhanced compliance with international human rights and humanitarian law, he also stressed that violations must be met with appropriate Council action, such as the threat of targeted sanctions or referrals to the International Criminal Court. There was also a need to more consistently and effectively engage non-State armed groups in order to improve their compliance with the law, he added.

Briefing the Council, Navanethem Pillay, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, said that a “people’s spring” continued to thaw the global landscape, with the election of a new Government in Côte d’Ivoire, the birth of South Sudan as a new nation and the dawn of a new era in Libya. Progress had been made, but it was critically important to consolidate those gains by ensuring accountability and respect for the rule of law, she emphasized, encouraging the Council to play a more active role in securing follow-up to recommendations and ensuring practical arrangements to secure accountability. “Without it, impunity emboldens perpetrators and breeds more violations that will undermine peace and progress,” she noted.

Where basic human rights were trampled and peaceful demands for change met with brutal force, people were eventually compelled to exercise recourse, she continued. That had happened in Libya and might yet occur in Syria, with the serious risk of the latter country descending into an armed struggle, she cautioned. As for the situations in Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Gaza, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Abyei, she stressed that where national authorities failed to investigate credible allegations, it was incumbent upon the international community rigorously to establish the facts.

Catherine Bragg, United Nations Assistant-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, also briefed the Council, on behalf of Under-Secretary-General Valerie Amos, saying that conflicts were marked by the consistent failure of the parties concerned to comply with their legal obligation to respect and protect civilians. All situations of armed confrontation had in common violations of international humanitarian and human rights law, as well as failure to hold those responsible to account and to provide any form of justice or redress for their victims. “We cannot continue to ignore war crimes and serious violations of human rights law in conflict,” she stressed. “Nor can we ignore the need to ensure that victims see justice and reparations for the wrongs they have suffered.”

Philip Spoerri, Director of International Law and Cooperation at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), said the overarching challenge in protecting civilians was ensuring consistent respect for international humanitarian law, with greater accountability at the national level and through the International Criminal Court. Despite accepting that the success of civilian protection was notoriously hard to measure due to the impossibility of knowing how much suffering had been prevented, he said that should “never serve as an excuse nor obviate the need for accountability”. States held ultimate responsibility for protecting civilians, he added.

The Council also heard from its November presidency as President Aníbal António Cavaco Silva of Portugal said: “When civilians are a target and the national authorities or the conflicting parties fail in their obligation to protect them, the United Nations — and especially the Security Council — has the duty to speak up and the obligation to act.”

He went on to point out that although the Council had been improving its legal framework to ensure that its civilian-protection measures were more effective and responsible, further coordination among all parties involved would be needed, as would greater international awareness of the need to develop efficient prevention and monitoring mechanisms. Another fundamental aspect was the need to strengthen accountability for human rights violations, he said, stressing that fighting impunity, through national or international institutions such as the International Criminal Court, was fundamental to the prevention of future violations.

In the ensuing debate, speakers noted that the protection of civilians lay at the heart of the Council’s work, with Nigeria’s representative saying that the United Nations effectiveness, and that of the Council, was measured against its ability to protect civilians. Speakers also highlighted the Council’s responsibility to refer situations to the International Criminal Court and to monitor ongoing situations, through commissions of inquiry if necessary. They cited in that regard the 2005 World Summit Outcome document, which underlined, among other things, the “responsibility to protect” civilians if States were unwilling or unable to do so.

Switzerland’s representative, speaking for the “Group of Friends of the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict”, emphasized that, in considering accountability mechanisms, the important question of reparations for violations should not be forgotten. Reparations were not limited to financial compensation, but included such measures as rehabilitation for the victims, public apologies, commemorations and tributes, he added.

Brazil’s representative went further, pointing out that exercising international military action with the aim of protecting civilians did not make collateral casualties or unintended destabilization any less tragic. Because the United Nations could authorize the use of force, it was under the obligation to develop fully an awareness of the dangers involved and to set up mechanisms that could provide an objective and detailed assessment of those dangers, as well as ways and means of preventing harm to civilians. The collective point of departure should be “first, do not cause harm”, she said.

Expanding on those concerns, South Africa’s representative emphasized that civilians could not be harmed in the name of protecting civilians, adding that the Council’s authorization of protection for Libyan civilians had been exploited. Condemning international actions in that country, he said they had gone far beyond the resolution, stressing that those who went beyond Council decisions should bear full responsibility. Other speakers from Africa emphasized that Council actions should be impartial. Although the carefully calibrated actions in Côte d’Ivoire had stabilized the situation, those aimed at ensuring the protection of civilians in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Western Sahara were lagging, they said.

Venezuela’s representative said that to use the concept of civilian protection in order to overthrow Governments in developing countries was immoral. Describing the economic greed of some Powers as the main threat to human life, he said the constant foreign intervention of imperialist Powers in the internal matters of countries of the South, under the pretext of protecting civilians, must be rejected. The notion of “responsibility to protect” had been manufactured by the ideologues of neoliberalism, he said, adding that it had provided the pretext for acts of aggression in violation of international humanitarian and human rights law. The case of Libya was emblematic in that regard, he noted.

Several speakers pointed out that many civilians had been killed in Syria recently and called on that country’s Government to comply with the peace plan agreed with the League of Arab States. Syria’s representative pointed out that some North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members had killed 130,000 Libyan civilians under the civilian-protection banner. The United States had called upon Syrian civilians not to turn their weapons over to the authorities, he noted, adding that such policy risked jeopardizing the efforts of the League of Arab League’s initiative.

Several speakers said the Council’s actions should be based on facts, and stressed the importance of monitoring. The Council should revert to mandating commissions of inquiry when serious violations of humanitarian or human rights law were alleged, they said, underlining the importance of the work carried out by the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission.

Other speakers today were representatives of the United Kingdom, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Colombia, India, France, United States, Russian Federation, China, Gabon, Germany, Lebanon, Egypt (on behalf of the Non-Aligned Movement), Australia, Guatemala, Israel, Austria, Honduras, Bangladesh, Canada, Luxembourg, Mexico, Peru, Norway, Georgia, Slovenia, Chile, Japan, Sri Lanka, Morocco, Pakistan, Malaysia, Tunisia, Sudan, Liechtenstein, Azerbaijan and Armenia.

The Head of the European Union delegation also spoke, as did an official of the International Humanitarian Fact-finding Commission.