Libya revolt amended state sovereignty rule

• Other nations were obliged to step in to protect rights of vulnerable citizens

The revolutionary uprisings in the Arab world have implications far beyond the region. Certain autocratic governments in sub-Saharan Africa clearly have gotten a message, although perhaps not necessarily the right one from these events.

Presumably the “right” message would be that it is time to take seriously the interests and concerns of citizens who have not been allowed to express them because of authoritarian suppression, and to do so before citizens conclude that regime change is the only acceptable option.

A “wrong” message, which at least a few sub-Saharan governments have “received” from the Middle East upheavals is that they need to redouble their efforts to suppress opposition and dissent before it takes the form of regime threatening protests.

In all of the media coverage of these events in the Middle East and North Africa, very little attention has been paid to the meaning of these events for a fundamental transformation of the international order that has occurred simultaneously with the spread of democracy’s Third Wave in sub-Saharan Africa over the last two decades.

What has happened is that the principle of state sovereignty has been sharply amended and qualified. These qualifications have been expressed in the doctrines of “Responsible Sovereignty,” and “Responsibility to Protect,” (or R2P) meaning that states were now to be obliged to protect the basic rights and fundamental needs of their citizens or accept international sanctions, and potentially intervention, to correct a state’s shortcomings in this regard.

Since the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, the fundamental organising principle in international relations has been that states are sovereign — that they are in charge of all that happens within their borders and are not subject to external direction concerning them from any source.

The United Nations Charter is built upon the same fundamental principle that it is an organisation of sovereign states who may voluntarily agree to abide by certain policies — what we now call international regimes.

The Treaty of Westphalia established that country differences in official religions, were no longer to be grounds for hostile action against one another, thus establishing that states, like individuals, can coexist while differing with each other on important matters.

Of course, the very existence of the United Nations, particularly the Security Council, put this principle to a test, since if a principle was important enough that nations needed to agree on it, how could they not agree also to implement against non-complying states?

The origins of the parallel doctrines of responsible sovereignty and R2P lie with two distinguished Africans — former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan of Ghana, and Sudanese scholar, poet and diplomat Francis Deng.

An International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) presented these ideas formally in its 2001 report, the concerns being not only humanitarian crises, but also violations of international law in the forms of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity.

Though widely accepted as legitimate international codes, or regimes, these principles have nonetheless elicited controversy.

Would small states be victimised? Would the principles be applied equally and equitably? What about pre-emption of terrorist activities or restraining proliferation of weapons of mass destruction? Nonetheless, the African Union Executive Council signed on to R2P at its March 2005 meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

The 2005 World Summit stipulated that R2P entailed the international community’s responsibility to “use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means to help populations” threatened by humanitarian disasters or crimes against humanity, genocide, and ethnic cleansing.

“When a state manifestly fails in its protection responsibilities, and peaceful means are inadequate,” the Summit decided, “the international community must take stronger measures, including collective use of force authorised by the UN Security Council under [UN Charter] Chapter VII.”

What has not been made explicit, or at least not emphasised sufficiently, is an implied partnership between the international community, organised through the United Nations and regional organisations like the AU, and citizens of countries where R2P requires intervention.

Seemingly unstated is an implied contract in which the citizens of those countries as well as the international community each have responsibilities to act as well.

The revolutionary upheavals in North Africa and the Middle East have dramatised the reality and importance of this implied contractual relationship between citizens and the international community.