Permanent Representative of Chile to the UN
"The Humanitarian Responsibilities of the United Nations Security Council"
1996 Gilbert Murray Memorial Lecture
Oxford, England
June 26, 1996
It is a privilege for me to deliver the 1996 Gilbert Murray Memorial Lecture, both because of the towering classical figure of the human being he was, and because of the honorable company of such notable personalities who have preceded me in this endeavour.
I am grateful to OXFAM-UK and Ireland for this opportunity. Indeed, I am grateful to you and all of the nine affiliates of OXFAM International for your efforts to leverage nearly half a billion dollars in program funds distributed to more than 4,000 partner organizations in more than 70 countries, to promote dignity and development among the peoples of the world.
We very much need that type of mission and that type of will in the world today. But I also have to say as an activist from within my own society in our efforts at democratic reconstruction, reconciliation and human development, I cannot forget the different ways (both spiritual and material) in which the OXFAM family expressed its solidarity with the people of Chile in the darkest moments of the dictatorship that ruled our land. Our success stories of national and international solidarity were very much a part of what enabled us to get out of such a difficult moment; so thank you again for what was done.
In my previous nongovernmental activities, I have closely followed OXFAM's approach at the country level, in Latin America and elsewhere; your staunch advocacy of the centrality of women to economic and social development- your insistence on environmental and social sustainability of any policy; your willingness to work in partnership with organizations dedicated to expanding the spaces for social change rather than reducing them, which one sees so much of today.
In my recent work within the United Nations -- most specifically, in my capacity as Chairperson of the World Summit for Social Development, hosted just a little over a year ago in Copenhagen -- I have become still more familiar with OXFAM. I respect your reputation for knowing what the Americans would call the real bottom line. You know the difference between opportunity and hand-outs; the distinction between access to power and democratic use of power; and the delineation between relief and development; also your analysis of the dangers of globalization; and very particularly, your humanitarian work in strife-ridden societies.
I want to thank Tricia Feeney and the whole of the OXFAM team for the extraordinary contribution that you made to the direction, the content, and the substance of the Social Summit. I believe that one of the main responsibilities we have within the United Nations is to open up spaces to those of you who are doing the type of work that OXFAM does, with a foot in the reality of so many different societies.
You have invited me to address the question of the humanitarian responsibilities of the Security Council. For me this is a natural follow-up to the Social Summit. For we are once again addressing the challenge of putting people at the center of development and international cooperation, this time in a different sphere of action within the United Nations.
The humanitarian work that OXFAM does is very much part and parcel of social advancement. At the same time, humanitarian tasks and development objectives are continually crisscrossing and reinforcing each other. They are not sequential, but rather, different dimensions of an integrated understanding of how to promote the security of people.
I make my remarks on the basis of having observed for many years the work of the Council from the outside -- and, for the last six months, from the inside representing Chile (which has been elected to sit on that body for the period 1996-1997).
I will not give you a comprehensive and integrated view of these questions. They go far beyond the limits of this lecture. Rather, I wish to refer to some matters that the Council should deal with more urgently.
I. Framework Definitions and Key Issues
I would like to start by making some general comments that frame and influence this issue.
The Charter confers on the Security Council primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security. Until recently, this has been understood basically to mean disputes among states with international consequences. That was the original intention of the Charter.
Yet these two bedrock concepts -- peace and security, the very conceptual foundations for the organization's mission -- are undergoing a radical change of perception today.
Peace, we agree by now, is much more than the mere absence of war. Peace has come to mean more than harmony among nations; it also means harmony within nations. Countries which are not actively "at war with other countries are, not necessarily at peace with themselves. In an era when individual people and communities struggle to hold their own against seemingly insuperable odds, peace increasingly means the absence of threats and discriminations. It means freedom from fear and want and knowing what to do with it. For people everywhere, the heart of peace is peace within our own hearts, within our families, our schools, our work places, our communities. Peace has acquired a human and community dimension much larger than the original state-centered notion of the UN Charter and we have learned that its absence has multiple international implications.
The concept of security, in turn, is also evolving. Today, it means inclusion, cohesion, and integration -- a sense of belonging to a society and a prevailing order within and among nations predicated on fairness and respect for differences and human dignity. The only legitimate (and lasting) security is security rooted in the well-being of people. We have all observed that you can have a secure state -- in the traditional sense -- full of insecure people facing poverty, destitution, and different dangers to their integrity. The security of people has thus emerged as a complementary and distinct notion from that of the security of the state.
Another important evolution has been the growing presence in the Security Council agenda of internal conflicts in which the "parties to a dispute" are not sovereign states but rather groups or factions within a state, sometime even mere warlords, most of which do not represent an entity that has the attributes of a state as defined by the traditional norms of international law.
The first ten years of the Security Council's activities were marked by state conflicts arising out of cold war situations, the initial tensions of the decolonization process, threats of external aggression, and traditional frontier disputes among countries. In all of them, the humanitarian dimension existed but was not a central feature of the dispute.
In the last ten years, by contrast, the agenda of the Security Council has been fraught with civil war-type situations in which the humanitarian crisis looms paramount. Suffice to mention Namibia, Cambodia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Afghanistan, Georgia, Angola, Mozambique, Liberia -- and also Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi, and the former Yugoslavia - To know what we are talking about. In these types conflict, more and more, it is civilians (unarmed unprotected) that are the principal victims of civil strife. During the first world war, 5% of all casualties were civilians; in Cambodia and Rwanda, almost 95% were.
Furthermore, it is understood that the Security Council is to operate under the aegis of the basic principles of international law, a central tenet of which is non-interference in the internal affairs of the states. Yet, if the Council is to be effective in promoting solutions and agreements to end this type of conflict, it inevitably ends up knee-deep in the internal affairs of that particular society. Moreover, if the humanitarian crisis is serious enough, there are understandably, strong reactions from public opinion asking the Council to "do something" to stop death and destruction.
Over the last years, the Security Council has repeatedly been told: "look at the horrible tragedies that are going on in the world. Do something about them!" But the whole tradition of diplomacy leads elsewhere. It is more difficult to apply classical diplomacy to these new conflicts. And this is the main point that I want to make: that under those conditions, a stronger link must evolve between the United Nations, the Security Council and organizations like OXFAM -- who are on the ground, doing humanitarian work, who are touching those societies, looking into the eyes of the people in danger, learning who they are and what is going on and who the factions are and what relations people have with their leaders -- much of which never gets to the table of the Security Council.
The evolution of the concepts of peace and security -- against the backdrop of mainly internal conflicts with strong humanitarian dimensions and an international public opinion demanding action - raises new issues in which the Council must re-examine the appropriateness and effectiveness of the available instruments and traditional diplomatic courses of action.
II. A Window Towards Civil Society
Some initial conclusions can be drawn with respect to the work of the Council.
Maintaining peace and security must also take into consideration the underlying causes of conflict, often development-related, as well as expressions of obvious power struggles among leaders. The nature of preventive diplomacy, conflict resolution, peace-making and peace-building, however, is still too state-centric. Together, governments and civil society must evolve a more dynamic concept and praxis, within which nongovernmental actors play a key role. The notion of what some of us call "preventive development" is key: conflicts very often have development origins, but are too often dealt with as if they were exclusively political problems. We need to link analysis of the development causes to the actual political processes underway. We can also build upon the lessons learned from experiences of conflict resolution efforts at the interpersonal level and within divided communities, which are sometimes more relevant than classical dispute resolution tools.
The tendency to speak of peace and security basically in state-centric and crisis terms fails to take into the account the multiple development and humanitarian factors which undergird the security of people, or the vital need to safeguard and support individual actors in civil society, whose energy and mutual confidence are essential to maintaining peace and security in the long term within those societies.
A critical feature of the last decade is the development of a burgeoning global civil society movement, within which OXFAM is a central player. The impact of nongovernmental actors of innumerable variety -- representatives of unions, churches, voluntary groups, and grassroots organizations -- has been tremendous. Together, they have helped shape our contemporary definitions of sustainable development, population, gender, and human rights, and in their characteristically practical style, have pushed governments to develop the concrete means to translate these concepts into action. This role in socio-economic thinking and actions is well-known and generally acknowledged.
But, they are also centrally involved in actions related to humanitarian relief, thus helping to increase the chances of conflict resolution. The profoundly internal dimensions of contemporary crisis -- and the increasingly central role nongovernmental actors play in forging a sustainable peace -- have brought OXFAM and other nongovernmental actors much closer than in the past to the analysis and action of international political affairs. This is happening de facto, but in my view, is insufficiently recognized by the Security Council and consequently, the experience of humanitarian organizations is being underutilized.
The Council's method of work and mandate are sufficiently broad to incorporate, in an appropriate way, inputs coming from civil society organizations within its scope of operations. However, these elements are far less than broadly interpreted and much less than flexibly applied. Indeed, while acknowledging the highly sensitive nature of the Council's work, more widespread consultation and transparent decision-making is necessary not only to enhance accountability vis-a-vis the general assembly, member governments, and public opinion, but also to have a broader basis of information, experience, and professional advice for its decision making.
Given that OXFAM and so many other nongovernmental actors are increasingly involved in assisting, safeguarding and enhancing the security of people threatened by active conflict, it is only logical that your role be fully acknowledged and that you are enabled (safely and successfully) to carry out your specific humanitarian contribution in the field. It is thus in practical terms that I wish to consider the Security Council with you today:
I am convinced that the Security Council itself could be better organized to this end. In this connection, I wish to call your attention to several provocative suggestions set forth in an excellent report entitled The International Response to Conflict and Genocide: Lessons From the Rwandan Experience.' The report contains a number of practical suggestions, highlighting a reinvigorated role for the department of humanitarian affairs, as well as the role of regional and nongovernmental organizations, the military, judiciary, and the media -- which are all well worth considering.
I would add that what the Council truly needs is an additional mechanism to raise the political profile of humanitarian coordination -- to put it on par with military coordination. Let me offer a practical example: Chile and other countries have advocated that troop-contributing countries be directly privy to Security Council deliberations over where and how their soldiers will be deployed in peacekeeping operations. A special provision for consultation has been approved for this purpose.
Similarly, there should be a regular "consultative window" through which to engage outside actors who have a unique and often first-hand perspective on the specificity of a given conflict and on where and how humanitarian operations can most safely and productively be executed. Such background information and exchange would enhance the decision-making capacity of the Council. Such a "window" could evolve from the present contacts with humanitarian NGO's undertaken by the department of humanitarian affairs.
III. Security of Humanitarian Relief
What protections exist amidst conflict and in complex humanitarian emergencies for you and other members of the nongovernmental community?
As stated before, with the end of the cold war, the UN has, become increasingly involved in conflict resolution within states-in-crisis. Calls upon the UN to take a proactive role in responding to complex humanitarian emergencies have increased apace. In this context, the safety on the ground of United Nations and non-UN personnel alike has become a pressing issue.
Staff of OXFAM and other NGO's have fallen victim to brutal attacks and harassment over the past year. In addition to the OXFAM worker recently killed in Angola, three red cross workers were murdered in Burundi scarcely a month ago. The irony is that while their loss was mourned among many in the nongovernmental community, it provoked nowhere near the response that the loss of uniformed military personnel has elicited in connection with UN peace building operations elsewhere.
Indeed, sometimes governments appear more willing to sacrifice the lives of relief workers than they do their own troops: the former serve out the conviction that their presence builds peace; the latter have accepted participation in the dangers of conflict as part of their terms of service. Yet it is often non-uniformed relief and development workers who are on the front lines of conflicts in which some governments are reticent to commit their own troops.
That is quite incredible: one group are the professionals of danger -- they were instructed and trained to deal with that -- and yet, for a number of internal political reasons, governments don't want to put them in a place of danger. The other group are there out of conviction, out of their beliefs and values, and are prepared to face the dangers and difficulties. Yet relief and development workers operate with far fewer resources or protections, and stay long after the active fighting has ceased -- remaining as long as possible, until security in its fullest sense is assured or until it is patently impossible for them to stay.
Some would argue that relief development workers have become de factco advance-men and women in conflicts where states have no real political intent or practical means to guarantee their safety -- let alone, achieve peace. Others allege that the political and humanitarian dimensions of complex emergencies are poorly understood, and that lack of coherent situation assessment, priority-setting, and field operations on the part of the international community not only lengthens the agony of people living in countries in crisis, but puts at risk those trying to help them.
The Security Council itself, in light of the tragedies which have unfolded over the course of the past five years in Afghanistan, Angola, Bosnia, Burundi, Georgia, Haiti, Lebanon, Liberia, Rwanda, Somalia and elsewhere, has begun to reference explicitly in its decisions the role of nongovernmental humanitarian actors in peace building and emergency situations. A recent statement on Somalia by the president of the Security Council reflects this trend, and I quote: "the Security Council considers the uninterrupted delivery of humanitarian assistance to be a crucial factor in the overall security and stability of Somalia." I consider this statement a very significant political recognition of the role that humanitarian agencies are playing in conflict situations.
Humanitarian concerns have indeed become central to the calculus of whether and how the UN's continued (official) presence in a country can advance the peace building process. On Liberia, statements by the President have been equally direct, noting that as of early April 1996, "factional fighting, the harassment and abuse of the civilian population and humanitarian and relief workers" had increased to the point that the country's political leaders "risk[ed] losing the support of the international community.
The challenge is to develop a series of interlocking legal and logistical safeguards -- shored up by the political will of countries to enforce them, and operationalized through a coherent UN system that functions in tandem with regional, national, and local institutions.
The ultimate responsibility for peace, however, rests with those in power in a country in crisis. I deliberately avoid the use of the word "government," for in many conflicts, those in power have not necessarily been elected nor do they conduct themselves with any sense of civic obligation towards majority rule, or the capacity to govern effectively. Their claim to legitimacy often rests on nothing more than having gained physical control of the capital city and seat of government through force.
Pressure can nonetheless be brought to bear upon those in power -- pressure not only to resolve a conflict, but to respect the humanity of individuals engaged in building the foundations of a sustainable peace, whether formally in partnership with the United Nations or independent of it.
I also believe the Council should consider, in particular, the compelling issue of strengthened legal provisions for protection of humanitarian workers.
This is an extremely complex issue, but we know that law is only as vigorous as its application. We must address the challenges of implementation of international humanitarian law. It could be argued that discourse on this subject has occupied policy makers and academics for the better of the past century; however, I raise it with you today because of the compelling nature -- indeed, the urgency -- of the subject, given the proliferation of highly complex conflicts in which the principal disputants appear increasingly dismissive of these fundamental anchors of global order. Given, too, the multiplicity of agents involved in relief work, we must find new ways to strengthen the legal safeguards available.
There is a lacunae in international law today, where you have nongovernmental workers acting more or less autonomously in a conflict situation, unprotected. What you have at present is a UN convention that safeguards those who perform humanitarian work done in agreement and under the aegis of the framework of the UN -- but no one else.
OXFAM could lead others in civil society to press for the creation of a separate convention which explicitly protects nongovernmental personnel and others in civil society affiliated with UN relief efforts -- whether or not they fall directly under the umbrella of UN control.
I believe we should explore what kinds of protections and enforcement should be guaranteed by such a convention. Who would adjudicate it? And how could reporting and related enforcement be expeditiously and effectively ensured?
What can be done to strengthen the mechanisms for the implementation of international humanitarian law? As you are no doubt well aware, signatory states are enjoined, under the Geneva Conventions, to respect core provisions concerning the protection of the sick and wounded, prisoners of war, and civilians. Through a mix of injunctions and prohibitions on contracting parties, the Geneva Conventions seek to protect "undefended localities" from attack while at the same time forbidding murder, torture, collective punishment, and hostage-taking, all of which are woefully common in contemporary conflict.
However, as pointed out in OXFAM's own September 1995 position paper prepared on the occasion of the UN's 50th anniversary (provocatively entitled "A Failed Opportunity?"), And I quote: "International Humanitarian Law, including the Geneva Conventions, [is] upheld in very few modern conflicts ... The debate about addressing the problem concentrates more on limiting the rights of states, rather than seeking to enforce the rights of individuals." This is a very apt assessment.
The fact that sanctions on states in breach of the conventions are extremely problematic has led some to suggest that individual reprisals are preferable. The recent tribunals established to address war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and genocide in Rwanda, respectively, offer a useful example of mechanisms for punishing individuals who violate the rules of international humanitarian law. It is encouraging to recognize that people in societies throughout the world are saying: "enough -- an end to impunity." Think about the difference in our collective consciousness from the days of Pol Pot -- and the genocide of millions in Cambodia, where there were no tribunals -- to our efforts today.
However, the operative (and financial) challenges faced by these tribunals is sobering. And even if an individual approach is pursued, there are blank spots in the Geneva Conventions; for example, they do not cover "gender crimes," like massive and individual rape as a method of torture and intimidation.
Herein, states can and must exercise their responsibility to ensure that humanitarian law is respected and rights fulfilled. The difficulty in bringing to justice the Serbian leaders Karadzic and Mladic, together with less visible Croatian and Bosnian personnel indicted, is a clear example -- a painful reminder of the separation between the notion that becomes law and the capacity to make the law become reality.
Above all, the importance of international NGO contributions to humanitarian efforts can not and should not be allowed to substitute for political will on the part of governments. Neither reforms in the organization of the Security Council, its consultative mechanisms nor the creation of additional juridical protections for humanitarian workers can substitute for what governments and governments alone can do.
Governments have the political responsibility to use their political clout, military capability, financial means, and diplomatic capacity to help solve these conflicts. The increasing role of humanitarian agencies is no excuse for their inaction. Highlighting the role of NGOs should serve to reinforce the responsibility of governments in this field.
IV. Making Sanctions More Humane and Effective
How does the international community engage itself in addressing the humanitarian consequences of sanctions?
Refugees and displaced persons; famines and shortages of food and water; prisoners of war and combatants missing in action; human rights violations; genocide and gross breaches of international humanitarian law; the effects of economic sanctions - these are among the central humanitarian consequences of conflict.
With limitations, there exist international mechanisms to address some of these consequences: among them, the office of the UN High Commissioner on Refugees; the World Food Program; the Geneva Conventions; the human rights mechanisms of the UN system; the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, as well as the Commission of Inquiry for Burundi.
By contrast, economic sanctions are a rough, blunt, and extremely unsophisticated measure. We need to develop policies and instruments to make sanctions more humane and at the same time, more effective. Both the underlying concepts and the implementation mechanisms need to be reviewed, taking into account the fact that in some instances (such as in South Africa and Burundi) some of the local and regional actors themselves felt that sanctions were necessary.
Let me note at the outset that I am not asserting sanctions are a priori illegitimate. - on the contrary, the foundation of every national legal system is the notion that breaking the law comes with a sanction. So it should be for the international system. There is no quarrel on the principle; that is why the Security Council has the authority to apply sanctions. The problem lies in the experience with the effects of the practical application of these measures.
A close read of the UN Charter reveals that sanctions essentially aim to condition the behavior of a state which poses a threat to international peace and security -- not to punish or otherwise exact retribution from the state, and even less to contribute to a humanitarian crisis in the nation affected. Sanctions must be based on fundamental respect for human dignity. Indeed, the aim is to bring a state that has violated justice into good working relations within the community of nations, to cite one thoughtful interpretation of the issue.
Chapter VII of the Charter thus empowers the Security Council to use both military and nonmilitary measures to maintain or restore international peace and security. Article 41 outlines the nature of nonmilitary sanctions -- specifying that the Security Council may call upon the member states of the UN to apply "complete or partial interruption of economic relations and of rail, sea, air, postal, telegraphic, radio, and other means of communications, and the severance of diplomatic relations" in order to give effect to the Council's decisions.
Yet the conceptual basis itself for sanctions is flawed, in that they are premised on implicitly democratic assumptions but are normally leveraged upon more or less authoritarian regimes. It is assumed that the people in a targeted country who will first feel the negative impact of sanctions are sufficiently empowered to pressure the government to cease the aggression or offense which triggered the sanctions. This is not often-the case in an undemocratic setting. Moreover, Johan Galtung and others have argued that sanctions can disempower and weaken regime opponents by offering the regime a common, external enemy against which to rally collective opposition -- thereby distracting attention from domestic problems.
Sanctions normally fail to affect the life of the "leaders" of such regimes and instead hit the most vulnerable the hardest; in that sense, they are highly unproportional. While "humanitarian exceptions" can be made to allow the targeted country to receive or purchase medical or food supplies, for example, there are not set guidelines for regulating when and how humanitarian assistance is to be provided.
Iraq is a good case in point. As you know, after the Gulf War, wide-ranging sanctions were applied by the Security Council in 1991, including a humanitarian exception. Yet at the same time, a trade embargo was imposed. Iraq's means to make use of the exception became strongly limited, and it did not give priority to food and medicine in the use of the internal resources it had.
When data by the FAO, WHO, UNICEF, and private organizations began to reveal the terrible humanitarian consequences that ensued, the Security Council approved in 1995 the now well known resolution 986, which permitted the sale of oil for food and medicine. In 1996, an agreement was reached between the Secretary General and the government of Iraq to implement this resolution.
This situation begs the obvious question. Did the Security Council have to wait until 1995 and Iraq postpone its response until 1996 to alleviate the suffering of the more destitute of the Iraqi people? Shouldn't the oil-for-food and medicine agreement have been a part of the initial sanctions resolution? Were all the deaths and infirmities necessary? What political purpose of the international community was served by them?
Furthermore, practice has shown that the targeted government will prefer to use the scarce resources available to prop up its own power through military spending and disbursements for the elites and the groups and factions that give it political support. The well-being of the general population (which, under authoritarian conditions, has little ability to react) has not proven to be a priority. Iraq is a textbook case. So is the former Yugoslavia, which chose to use existing resources to wage a regional war and support its regime while downplaying the humanitarian impact of sanctions so as to avoid international pressure on the issue.
Ultimately, sanctions as currently practiced produce large-scale human insecurity, the opposite of their intended effect. The Security Council needs to address the issue promptly. The principal objective would be to make sanctions regimes both more effective and more humane. Some ideas follow on practical ways of doing so.
As a first step, the Council should adopt a resolution approving a set of humanitarian norms, standards, and practices applicable to any sanctions regime to be established in the future. Such guidelines should bear in mind that humanitarian requirements may differ according to the stage of development, geography, natural resources and other features of the affected society.
A clear position by the Council has a number of advantages. It avoids humanitarian double standards, is a practical response to a real problem the Council is facing, and should be flexible enough to encompass different realities.
Its end result would be to ensure that the Security Council would act in such way as to basically avoid humanitarian consequences of sanctions regimes. This approach goes much further than the way the general assembly has dealt with the matter (namely, by stating that "unintended adverse side effects on the civilian population should be minimized" by appropriate humanitarian exceptions).
It is disingenuous to talk of "unintended side effects" when everybody knows that the sector most affected by sanctions, as presently applied, are precisely civilian populations. There is nothing surprising or unintended about it. That's the way economic sanctions actually operate in practice. We are all perfectly aware of that.
Such action by the Security Council could include the following elements:
1. Make clear that the purpose of sanctions is to modify the behaviour of a party that is threatening international peace and security and not to punish or otherwise exact retribution and even less to impose humanitarian hardships on the population at large. Sanctions regimes should be commensurate with these objectives and proportionality should be a guiding criteria.
2. Sanctions should be primarily addressed to the leaders in power by targeting them on the military and civilian structures that support the regime and on the factions, groups, and warlords that are parties to a civil war type of conflict. We need to shift the impact of sanctions from the people at large to the leaders in particular through, among other means, measures related to bank accounts, commercial interests, stocks and properties in foreign countries, residence status and visas.
Indeed, the broader challenge is to develop effective sanctions which wholly avoid humanitarian costs. One example is sanctions on transit rights, along with air and sea boycotts (except for transport of needed humanitarian goods). Another example involves limits to representation in inter-governmental forums. Yet another involves the refusal to provide arms to sanctioned regimes -- this including the shipment of arms already sold or promised. To date, the practical effect of arms embargoes has simply been to raise the price of arms. We must move toward commitment on the part of arms producing countries to significantly improve monitoring of arms transfers -- in effect, to rigorously self-police.
3. A provision for humanitarian exceptions should always be included in any sanctions regime, together with the means to make it effective. No exception will work if there are no national or international resources to draw upon. The processing of requests under the exception should be much more expeditious and should contain some elements of automaticity for UN agencies, the International Red Cross and well-known humanitarian NGO's. A review and evaluation of the work of Sanctions Committees of the Council in relation to humanitarian impacts should be undertaken. In general, methods and procedures should be expedited.
4. A regular evaluation by the Council on the potential and actual humanitarian effects of sanctions on the country should be undertaken. Rigorous criteria must be developed for judging their impact, particularly on the most marginalized and vulnerable members of society. The Secretary General should make available the following:
(a) Prior to the imposition of the sanctions, an appraisal of their potential humanitarian effects and the suggested measures to avoid them.
(b) After the entry into force of the regime, a regular evaluation of its humanitarian impact and, if negative, the changes necessary to counter them.
(c) To carry out such assessments and/or evaluations, the assistance of concerned international and financial institutions, relevant intergovernmental and regional organizations and non-governmental organizations, should be sought.
To this end, appropriate systems must be developed for regular, unimpeded monitoring, evaluation and dissemination of related data on the humanitarian impact of sanctions.
When a humanitarian situation is about to arise within a targeted country, it is critical that such situations be brought immediately to the attention of the Security Council and that specific corrective steps be outlined; uniformity of assessment criteria and of sanctions rulings is critical.
5. In conflict-ridden societies, it is normal that humanitarian activities were underway before sanctions were applied. The right of the general population to bodily integrity and subsistence goods should not be violated. Thus, authorities of the targeted country and of the different factions and parties to the conflict must commit themselves to ensure a continuous, impartial and expeditious delivery of humanitarian assistance. This includes:
(a) Access to the necessary information required by United Nations and non-governmental humanitarian agencies
(b) No action to hamper the day-to-day activities of relief workers
(c) Guarantees for the security of humanitarian personnel, their offices, homes and operational sites
(d) Unimpeded access to conflict areas and the use of ports, airfields, roads and other infrastructure.
The sanctions regime should consider strict measures to insure compliance with the above.
In more general terms, sanctions regimes should have clear objectives, provisions for regular review, and precise conditions for being lifted.
This could entail warning countries clearly that sanctions are likely to be applied in consequence for specific actions; specifying an agreed-upon timeframe for evaluating the extension, modification, or lifting of the sanctions; and outlining provisions for progressive, partial, or early-lifting (including the precise steps required from the target country).
Conclusions
Even with strengthened protections on paper for humanitarian workers (in the form of conventions for their protections), and even with your involvement in measures to ensure that sanctions themselves do not become the enemy of the good, the Security Council is, in the final analysis, a tool of governments. It can only play a strong humanitarian role at their behest.
Without political will to truly avoid conflict, or to make hard sacrifices necessary to preserve peace and promote long-lasting security, there is little guarantee that humanitarianism will not become deeply mired in its own inherent contradictions. For much of humanitarian "relief" today appears to even its most ardent supporters to be a band-aid over the scars of years of social and economic decay, which have festered to the point that open wounds confront us with the raw reality of women, children and the elderly alike becoming sniper's targets -- along with the persons seeking to assist them.
What can we do to stem the tide of brutality? How can we heal the wounds of conflict that rend even societies which appear to be "at peace" from without. Taking notice and calling upon our governments to make human concerns central to statecraft is the first and most important step. Only when we are truly able to ensure the security of people will the Security Council itself have succeeded in its mission.
Well beyond the Council's immediate reach are the societies of its member states -- indeed, all members of the family of nations. The challenge is to find ways to animate civil society with a renewed understanding of the contemporary means to pursue peace and security -- beyond the sometimes cynical and narrowly political aims of "diplomacy" as traditionally practiced.
Among the most committed people working to achieve these aims are, in fact, individuals such as Jimmy Carter, Julius Nyerere, and Oscar Arias -- all of whom have actively participated in politics at the highest level, none of whom has lost sight of the humanism which must be at the heart of humanitarianism itself.
If I finalize these words by mentioning outstanding personalities, it is because there is no substitute for the commitment of individual human beings within government and civil society who want to make a difference, who are prepared to act on the basis of values and vision rooted in the belief that human beings can ultimately find solutions to seemingly insoluble problems.
Cynics would want us to believe that there is no space for values in the globalized world of today; those cynics who, in the words of Oscar Wilde, "know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Yet if we are assembled here today, under the auspices of OXFAM, it is because we know from historical experience that humanitarian work and its equivalents in the past have always meant that you have to swim against the current, in a never-ending struggle to promote and protect the dignity of people. We know that we will not give in to the moral indifference of our days and that our ethical convictions and political decision to act are far from being exhausted. We are many, and enough with the passion to make our world a better place to live.
