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From Never Again

Clare-Marie White looks at one of the outcomes of the UN Summit

After a week best described as the 'diplomatic piranha pool' in New York, the UN managed to agree a 35-page document for reform. I wrote endorsing Responsibility to Protect (R2P) in The Friend (9 September), but how did it fare?

'Here's the final text from this week's summit', wrote a genocide-fighting friend from China. 'Note and regret weak paragraph 139'. He is right: power to stop atrocities remains with the security council on a 'case by case' basis, which could let the Darfurs of our world continue with little interference for the time being.

However, a whirlwind briefing through the process from Gareth Evans, president of the International Crisis Group and a central architect of Responsibility to Protect, led me to feel more optimistic. For a start, he was impressed that the words stayed in the text at all. While much has been watered down and obscured in the reform document, Responsibility to Protect remained, and that is a fundamental shift in international sovereignty.

The agreement means that countries now have a moral duty to protect people from all crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing. That tricky term genocide no longer has to be demonstrable and, by definition, happening for action to take place. Intervention is not a first resort but there is now a lot more emphasis on supporting countries so that these atrocities do not happen.

R2P is not a part of QPSW's work programme as Friends have not asked for it to be, but Alan Pleydell, manager of the Post-Yugoslav programme, has been working to build support for it. He compares it to the process that happened in child protection, which is now considered perfectly normal. It wasn't enough to threaten those that might harm their children with jail, society needed to create a culture where the family unit was no longer inviolable, where parents accepted scrutiny and help could be enforced, if necessary, to change the behaviour that leads to abuse.

So far, this analogy hasn't really been utilised by those at the centre of R2P, but of course it is vital for behaviour to change rather than simply relying on a stronger UN to protect. Atrocity crimes do not start and end with an evil state power taking it upon themselves to exterminate a section of their people: prevention means a high level of awareness of conditions on the ground, not least whether there is a population willing to carry massacres out. War crime trials are all very well after the event, but fairly meaningless for those who have died, in the same way as locking up a father who killed his child with a beating.

Central to the original suggestions were a switch from simple intervention at the worst time to a full package of prevention, reaction and rebuilding. The peacebuilding commission, scheduled to be set up by December, will be a vital part of the joined-up thinking needed to make this happen. It will need support from civil society.

It is now up to all of us to take this up and start holding governments to account. The peace movement in Britain has been very quiet on R2P, in no way taking it up with the vigour that might have been expected. This has been blamed partly on Blair, who used R2P-type arguments in his case for invading Iraq, even though the conditions for intervention would not have justified the invasion under the R2P guidelines for several reasons, not least the massive scale of bombings and the carnage in the aftermath, which was predicted by experts.

Responsibility to Protect does not give a licence for cowboy invasions. The text agreed upon is explicit about the sort of crimes that are being talked about: crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and genocide.

As the UN makes a fresh start, we all have a new opportunity to get involved, as Friends have been doing since it began. The British government loves R2P, but don't let that put you off. The support of all of us is important if this 'emerging norm' is to grow teeth in practice.