Factum Perspective: The Humanitarian Catastrophe in Gaza
Revisiting “R2P” in a Multipolar World Order
By Lakmali Bhagya Manamperi
The responsibility of the international community for the protection of innocent civilians during times of humanitarian crisis has come to light with the recent escalation of the conflict in Palestine.
The attacks targeting civilians and civilian objects are a clear violation of international humanitarian norms and can no better be named as a crime against humanity. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict stands a complicated phenomenon: a geopolitical crisis existing beyond a mere religious tension.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres pointed out that the conflict has never happened “in a vacuum” but is very much a historical development, whereby Palestinians have been “subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation” and have become displaced in their own land. The statement pushed Israel to call an immediate stepdown of the UN Chief and make a declaration to cancel the issue of visas to UN representatives.
In the backdrop of these developments, many stood in solidarity with the people’s sufferings, be it the Palestinians or Israelis, and turned to the UN to call for an immediate solution for this decades-long political stalemate.
Humanitarian Intervention within the Mandate of the UN
The United Nations was established in 1945 with the purpose of maintaining international peace and security. Article 2 of the UN Charter upholds sovereign equality among member states whereby no state has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly for any reason whatsoever, in the internal or external affairs of any other.
Meanwhile, Article 51 of the UN Charter allows member states a limited right to use force in self-defense, the exact grounds which Israel provides for its counterattack on Hamas. However, even if this justification fits the criteria of proportionality of the attack to the aggression, its necessity and the reasonableness remains debatable.
Recent incidents at the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, the Al-Azhar University complex, and the UNRWA school (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees) located in Al Maghazi, where 4,000 displaced people had settled in a refugee camp, and the strike on an ambulance that killed 15 Palestinians in addition to other residents are clear violations of International Humanitarian Law. The lack of accessibility to hospital care and the blockade on fuel and humanitarian assistance has jeopardized the situation further.
Norm diffusion from the West to the rest
The overwhelming humanitarian crisis calls for humanitarian intervention from other nation states. The Responsibility to Protect, a commonly heard concept to the Sri Lankans with the experience during and in the aftermath of the decades-long war, has retrieved its position in the international discourse.
It was in 2001 that the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) published its landmark report, “Responsibility to Protect”, with its central proposition that State sovereignty entails responsibilities as well as rights. One such responsibility is to protect all people inside a state’s sovereign territorial jurisdiction.
When the State fails to discharge this duty owing to incapacity, unwillingness, or complicity in crimes, the responsibility trips upwards to the international community acting through the UN Security Council (the UNSC) as per Article 42 of the UN Charter. In fact, it redefines the principle of humanitarian intervention, as another exception to State sovereignty.
The West, through the United Nations General Assembly resolution, endorsed the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine based on the following pillars: the responsibility of each State to protect its populations; the responsibility of the international community to assist States in protecting their populations; and the responsibility of the international community to protect when a State is manifestly failing to protect its populations. All three pillars must be on equal height to prevent the edifice of R2P from tilting, tottering, and collapsing.
The doctrine was unanimously adopted by the UN General Assembly at the 2005 World Summit. Israel also endorsed it.
Israel exercises effective control over Gaza, which is its de facto occupied territory with no independent statehood. Therefore, for decades, Israel has failed to protect its population from atrocities committed in contravention with international instruments. This clearly fits the criteria set forth by the R2P doctrine.
R2P and the Global Players
The reformulation of “humanitarian intervention” as the “Responsibility to Protect” has long been referred to as an “international norm” within the UN’s official discourse, where UN bodies routinely invoke the doctrine within resolutions.
In the midst of the great powers playing a leading role in international relations, the non-West holds a hostile perspective toward the doctrine. R2P is often alleged to be an ethos of the Western Enlightenment, which carries the inherent tendency to remove and make subservient the “sovereign immunity” of weaker states.
The non-West claims that the humanitarian interventions in the past have not been beneficial and have sometimes aggravated crisis situations and created fresh problems. Non-Western nations also provide evidence of how powerful states in the international system have been walking back on commitments or seeing an opportunity to further weaken key international bodies that work to support these efforts.
The recent defeats of the resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza proves this argument and the argument that the humanitarian imperative is intertwined with the geopolitical constraints within the UN system, which remains dominated by the West through the P5 (Five Permanent members of the UN Security Council: the US, Russia, China, the UK, and France).
Under Article 27 of the UN Charter, on all but procedural matters, decisions of the Council must be made by an affirmative vote of nine members, including the concurring votes of permanent members. The veto power has become apparent in the decision-making procedures of the UNSC and has paralyzed many constructive and decisive actions taken to stop or avert the crisis hampering innocent civilians day by day in Gaza.
As of today, the Security Council has failed to adopt any draft resolutions — one from Brazil, two from Russian Federation, and one from the US — addressing the raging war in Gaza.
The initial resolution tabled by the Russian Federation on October 16 called for a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza. The release of all people taken into captivity since October 7, access to aid, and the safe evacuation of civilians were also among the main proposals. Five countries voted in favor, including China, Russia, and the UAE.
France, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the US voted against the resolution while six abstained, including Brazil, Ecuador, and Switzerland. The media reported that the main criticism made by those opposing it was that the resolution did not name or condemn Hamas.
A Brazilian-drafted resolution put forward on October 18 called for a “humanitarian pause” to allow full and unhindered aid into Gaza, the condemnation of violence against all civilians, and the rescission of Israel’s evacuation order. The resolution was vetoed by the US, which said it did not do enough to stress Israel’s right to self-defense. Russia and the UK abstained while 12 countries voted in favor.
The Russian Federation’s second version failed by a vote of four in favor – China, Gabon, Russian Federation, United Arab Emirates – and two against – the United Kingdom and United States – with nine abstentions – Albania, Brazil, Ecuador, France, Ghana, Japan, Malta, Mozambique, and Switzerland. It called for Israel to immediately cancel their evacuation order for northern Gaza and did not mention Israel’s “inherent right to self-defense”, an omission that supposedly made the entire text “unbalanced.”
Meanwhile, the recent US resolution failed by a vote of 10 in favor to three against – China, the Russian Federation, the United Arab Emirates – with two abstentions – Brazil and Mozambique. It called for a “humanitarian pause”, not a ceasefire, to allow aid into Gaza.
The text was drafted in favor of the inherent right of all states to self-defense and pushed for Hamas to release all its captives. Zhang Jun, UN Ambassador for China, explained the reason behind their veto by drawing the difference between a “humanitarian pause” and a “ceasefire”, which may last only a matter of hours and may fail to bring an end to the fighting or resolve the issue permanently.
Owing in each case to the veto or “no” vote of a Permanent Council member, all these resolutions failed, making it inevitable that everyone protects their allies and their own interests over humanitarian necessities.
Rise of China and Russia
Within the multipolar world order, the consensus around R2P continues to wobble. This comes at a time when the redistribution of power in the international system from West to East challenges the status quo and prevailing norms, including those based on human protection.
Professor Abdelwahab El-Affendi writing to Al-Jazeera states that the October 7 attack by Hamas stands out not so much because of its brutality, but because of its audacity, which revived insecurities generated by Western misadventures in the region, insecurities which resonate well in their mixed bag responses to calls for ceasefires and humanitarian pauses.
Thus, the rise of China and the resurgence of Russia in the UNSC resolutions creates points of tension and friction that can shape the dynamics between the permanent members of the UN Security Council. Their participation in the discourse resonates with the non-Western nations, who are trying to make the functions of the UNSC consistent, persuasive, and fully responsive to very real State and human security needs.
The hesitation to frame the “humanitarian cause” as R2P suggests that they do not stand with the historical applicability of the doctrine and thus do not support a repetition of it. As China and Russia emerge as important growth centers in the world economy, the age of the West disrespecting the “Rest” seems on its way to being challenged, and norm diffusion from West to the Rest seems on its way to being reversed.
Lakmali Bhagya Manamperi is a lecturer of law at the Law School of the Asia Pacific Institute of Information Technology or APIIT in Sri Lanka. She can be reached at lakmali.manamperi3@gmail.com.
Factum is an Asia Pacific-focused think tank on International Relations, Tech Cooperation, and Strategic Communications accessible via www.factum.lk.
The views expressed here are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the organization’s.