24 October 2013
Mr Chairman,
It is a special honour to be invited to accept an award which stands in the name of a person for whom one has the very greatest admiration. Simply put, Brian Urquhart is the fellow countryman whose contribution to the United Nations I most deeply respect. The year of his retirement after forty years of extraordinary service, 1986, was the year that I became Secretary General of Amnesty International and thus that my own real engagement with the UN began, so it is only later that I came to know him through his writings and in person. Before I respond to your invitation to reflect on the role of the UN in safeguarding peace and human rights in today’s context, I want to begin by associating myself with some of his strongly-expressed views about the UN which I share, and which it is timely, I believe, to insist should not only be supported, but campaigned for.
The world has never been more in need of leadership, and a multi-polar world especially needs multilateral leadership. Speculation about the next UN Secretary-General is already beginning. No-one has been more rightly or forthrightly critical of the manner in which past Secretaries-General have been selected than Brian Urquhart. In his autobiography, he noted that “although good men have been elected, looking for the person with the qualities best suited to this infinitely demanding and important job seems to hold a very low priority for governments”1; even when Dag Hammarskjold was chosen, he writes, “it was generally felt that he was a cautious, safe and non-political technocrat…[although] in this belief the distinguished permanent members of the Security Council were delightfully mistaken.”2 No one has made more sensible, specific proposals for Secretaries-General to be chosen in a rational, transparent and democratic fashion. These include serious consideration of the necessary qualifications as indicated by probable future demands on the UN; a single seven-year term; the cessation of the practice of individual campaigning; a well-organized search in good time for the best candidates worldwide, taking the initiative away from self-perceived or nationally sponsored candidates; the inclusion of women candidates in comparable numbers to men; and consultation by governments of parliamentary leaders and non-governmental bodies.3 Such proposals have come to naught, he has said, because of poor timing, a lack of interest on the part of delegations or a lack of public pressure. I know that this Association has been an advocate of such proposals in the past. Allow me to suggest that now is good timing for public pressure to urge a new process for the selection of the next Secretary-General, and for UNA-UK to re-open that debate here and seek commitments from our own government.
A new Secretary-General also needs to be set free of the pressures of governments which inhibit the selection of the best woman or man for senior leadership positions, whether in the Secretariat, at the head of agencies or leading missions in the field. As long ago as 1991, together with his co-author Erskine Childers, Brian Urquhart set out proposals for improving the quality and independence of senior UN leadership.4 These included reaffirmation of the General Assembly proscription of national monopolies on senior posts5, to be replaced by a general rule that no nationality should succeed the same nationality in the same post; and acceptance that no candidate for Secretary-General will be pressed by any member state for a commitment on any senior-level appointment. These, alas, are the opposite of the concessions that have repeatedly been sought by governments, especially by permanent members of the Security Council. From the very outset of his role in the foundation of the UN, Brian Urquhart was a determined internationalist, committed to an impartial and objective international civil service6, as required by Article 100 of the Charter. We can honour him by urging our own government to commit itself to these principles and proposals.
As a recipient of this award, I am further honoured to follow Margaret Anstee, the first woman Under-Secretary-General of the UN and the first woman head of a major peace operation in the field. Neither Brian Urquhart nor she came to the UN from careers in government. Nor of course did Kofi Annan, or Sergio Vieira de Mello. With the greatest respect for the professions of politics and diplomacy, I suggest that the leadership the UN needs, especially in the field, should not be drawn too predominantly from careers in government.
As Brian Urquhart and Erskine Childers once sharply observed, “the peoples of the United Nations introduce the Charter and then completely disappear from that document.”7 The great inspiration of the founder of Amnesty International, Peter Benenson, was to believe that individual people could affect the human rights conduct of governments. So I came to the UN from non-government, but not from anti-government. The Amnesty International that I headed of course exposed government human rights abuses, but it never confined itself to naming and shaming: it engaged seriously with governments whenever they were open to dialogue, including at the UN, and it made the foremost contribution to developing the UN human rights system and to providing it with country-specific information. The old Commission on Human Rights does not deserve to be referred to today as it is in the lazy media, always with the adjective “discredited”, and those who thought that replacing it with a new Human Rights Council could in some way escape the limitations of an intergovernmental body were foolishly naïve. But at Amnesty we analysed closely the deficiencies of UN human rights work in the 1980s, and became, I believe, the key voice persuading governments of the case for creating the new post of High Commissioner for Human Rights.
It was this engagement with the UN on behalf of Amnesty which led to my first UN appointment in Haiti in 1993. For me, it was in pursuance of a trend which I regarded as the most significant development in UN human rights practice, which we hoped a High Commissioner would further promote: a move beyond the committee rooms of Geneva and into the field. Over more than a decade, in missions in Haiti, Rwanda and Nepal, and as an adviser to successive High Commissioners, I sought to contribute to developing the practice of human rights monitoring in conflict and post-conflict settings. Subsequently, in East Timor, Nepal and most recently Libya, I became more broadly responsible for heading political missions, each in challenging human rights contexts. In Nepal, we showed that human rights monitoring during conflict could play a major role in paving the way to a peace process. Along the way, as human rights adviser to the Sri Lanka peace process (in a purely personal capacity), I tried and failed to persuade the parties to that conflict to accept an international human rights monitoring presence.
So this is the background from which I reflect on the role of the UN in safeguarding peace and human rights today. And certainly this is a time when we all must do so, confronted as we are daily by the horrors of mass human rights violations in Syria. The most positive recent contribution to advancing human rights protection through the UN stems from another failure: the Report of the Secretary-General’s Internal Review Panel on United Nations Action in Sri Lanka. It is greatly to the credit of Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson that they have fully accepted that Report’s analysis: that the failure of the UN to speak out more clearly and strongly about the Sri Lankan Government’s responsibility for the killings and other violations against the civilians trapped during the final stages of the conflict there was a “systemic failure.” The primary responsibility for these war crimes was of course that of the Government of Sri Lanka, as well as of the LTTE, and the insistence on the accountability of its officials and its army must be maintained. And much responsibility for an inadequate international response rests with Member States, which not only failed to act themselves, but also sought to discourage the Secretariat from doing so. But the Panel Report criticises a UN system that lacked, it says, an adequate and shared sense of responsibility for human rights violations; an incoherent internal UN crisis-management structure; the ineffective dispersal of UN headquarters structures across different entities with overlapping mandates; and a model for UN action in the field that was designed for a development rather than a conflict response.
This analysis is consistent with my own experience as I look back from my years in the field at New York and Geneva, and at current debates there. The creation of the post of High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the doors opened to it by successive Secretaries-General, have brought human rights some considerable way towards its proper place as a third pillar of the UN system. Humanitarians, who when I worked for Amnesty International mostly wanted to keep a firewall between themselves and human rights investigation and advocacy, are today committed to the protection of civilians. The Security Council, which twenty years ago avoided all mention of human rights in its mandates, now includes human rights components in all peace operations and mandates peacekeepers to intervene when civilians face massacre. New mandates for senior officials address the prevention of genocide, the responsibility to protect, children and sexual violence in armed conflict.
But human rights protection in practice happens through action in the field, and mandates and resolutions and senior officials are only as effective as they make a difference on the ground. Current UN debates revolve around three overlapping areas of discussion, and these are not being brought together harmoniously, either conceptually or operationally. The first revolves around genocide prevention and the responsibility to protect, led by the special advisers with these titles. The second takes place under the rubric of protection of civilians, led by the humanitarian and peacekeeping departments. The third is that of human rights promotion and protection within the classical normative framework of international law, led by the High Commissioner for Human Rights.
The conceptualisation of the responsibility to protect seemed to me a major advance beyond the divisive debate of the 1990s over humanitarian intervention, but sadly it has failed to transcend those divisions: too much energy is now devoted to discussing what is and is not an application of the doctrine of R2P, when it contributes nothing to the political and operational dilemmas of protection in contexts such as Sri Lanka or Syria. Nor is mass atrocity more likely to be prevented as a result of a definitional debate about genocide: I myself agreed with the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur that the mass atrocities there were not to be correctly defined as genocide, but this did nothing to affect my commitment, as adviser to the High Commissioner, to develop an effective human rights field presence there. The mandates of both special advisers bear the burden of serious terminological handicaps limiting the effectiveness of their advocacy, while adding nothing operationally in the field.
The proliferation of human rights mandates undoubtedly reflects a welcome strengthening of human rights commitment, most importantly against sexual violence and violence against children. But the Sri Lanka Panel Report rightly refers to “ineffective dispersal” across several different headquarters entities in Geneva and New York with overlapping mandates and duplication of staffing. Moreover, the Geneva system itself is fragmented, with an excessive number of special rapporteurs and mechanisms, and a lack of coordinated focus on countries among staff spread thinly across special procedures, treaty bodies and field operations. Seen from the field, multiple proposed visits and reporting requirements, the timing of which often flow from external pressures not from the country context, subvert an effective country strategy rather than contribute to its effectiveness. They even offer cynical authorities the opportunity of selective cooperation with the least challenging mechanisms. Those of us who with good intentions have sometimes pressed for new mandates should remind ourselves that more can be less.
Humanitarian actors are the ones who are most present in the field in situations of conflict, far beyond any likely presence of human rights field officers, and recognition of their responsibility to contribute to the protection of civilians is essential. But their need to differentiate themselves from the UN’s political responsibilities and to give priority to humanitarian access means that they should not be expected to lead public advocacy for human rights protection or the analysis and presentation of information on which it depends. Peacekeepers should never again stand by when they have the capability to protect civilians, but are now facing unrealistic expectations as to how far even substantial deployments can assume this responsibility: the Security Council crafts ambitious mandates to protect civilians when its permanent members have no intention of providing their own personnel or assets to improve the prospects of implementing them.
It was to improve the coordination, efficiency and effectiveness of the UN’s work for human rights that the Vienna World Conference resolved twenty years ago to create the post of High Commissioner for Human Rights. The first High Commissioner was confronted the day after he took office by genocide in Rwanda and launched Geneva’s first human rights field operation, which I later headed. Since then, the Office of the High Commissioner has developed its capacity to establish and manage field presences. But its transformation from a bureaucracy servicing the conference rooms of Geneva to a fully effective agency in the field is far from complete. Its New York office has been strengthened, but its predominant presence in Geneva still inhibits its essential engagement with the UN’s preventive diplomacy and crisis response. And its overall resources are inadequate, as well as being fragmented and not well managed. I believe that it is within the framework of the follow-up to the recommendations which emerged from the Sri Lanka Panel Report that many of these issues can and must be addressed.
In his opening address this September to the new session of the General Assembly, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon committed himself to implement those recommendations, and thus to ensure that the UN system upholds its human rights responsibilities under the Charter. Uppermost in all minds as he did so were the massive violations of human rights and humanitarian law which go on today in Syria. This time the UN is fulfilling its responsibility to put the terrible facts before Member States: the Secretary-General and the High Commissioner have spoken out strongly and repeatedly on the basis of the information gathered by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria mandated by the Human Rights Council. But Syria confronts us with the reality that human rights violations are the symptom of political conflict, and that sufficient consensus among Member States is the precondition for effective action through the United Nations. ‘We the people’ must continue to insist that a Secretariat independent of governments always puts before them violations of the principles of the Charter and of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and that our governments seek the multilateral agreement necessary for action to combat them.
Mr Chairman,
Allow me to associate in my acceptance of this award my colleagues during my years in the field. I think first of the Timorese staff of the UN Mission in East Timor who were murdered or targeted for their role in the self-determination ballot of 1999, and the international staff who volunteered to remain in a besieged UN compound until Timorese who had taken refuge there could be safely evacuated. I think of the human rights officers who deployed in the aftermath of genocide in Rwanda, where four colleagues were killed, and during on-going civil war in Nepal. And I think of those who are working today in perilous security conditions to try to assist Libya through a difficult transition. In the Epilogue to his autobiography, Brian Urquhart writes that “idealism, which is the distillation of human experience, is far more realistic than cynicism or defeatism.”8 There can be no greater privilege than to work with colleagues from all regions who share that idealism, under the flag of the United Nations and in the spirit of its Charter.
Ian Martin has worked to promote human rights, conflict prevention and peacebuilding, through the United Nations and through non-governmental organisations, most notably Amnesty International, where he served as Secretary-General from 1986 to 1992. He has headed United Nations missions in several countries, serving as Special Representative of the Secretary-General in East Timor (1999), Nepal (2007-9) and most recently Libya (2011-2), and has held other senior UN appointments regarding Gaza, Ethiopia and Eritrea, Rwanda and Haiti. Most recently, as Head of the UN Support Mission in Libya, tasked to assist with a range of duties including electoral assistance and police development, he was present in Tripoli as the National Transitional Council, with whom he had worked closely, handed over power to the General National Congress.
Footnotes
1 A Life in Peace and War, p.228
2 Ibid, p.124
3 A World in Need of Leadership, p.23-39
4 Towards a More Effective United Nations, p.38-9
5 General Assembly resolution 35/210 of 17 December 1980, “no post should be considered the exclusive preserve of any Member State, or group of States”, and subsequent iterations.
6 A Life in Peace and War, p.96
7 Renewing the United Nations System, p.171.
8 A Life in Peace and War, p.378