Argument: Blanket commitment creates a slippery slope of when to intervene.

A blanket commitment could lead the United Nations and the word into great dangers. It must be considered whether intervention with force is always practical. For example, in the past China's government has committed horrific human rights abuses, such as the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square massacre. These surely show a state unable or unwilling to protect its citizens and would have invited intervention under this proposal. Or perhaps you feel these are purely historical examples - but what if the Chinese regime in future used horrific force to put down future risings by Uighur or Tibetan ethnic minorities? Or what about present Russian behavior in Chechnya? Would the UN really deliver on an intervention in members of the security council? Where do they draw the line? How do they decide which countries have revoked sovereignty with their actions? How many people have to die? One of the concerns with the NATO invasion in Libya is that it sets a dangerous precedent [1] . The UN would very likely be taking far too much on if they truly adopt the “responsibility to protect” particularly because it is difficult to justly define when a government has gone too far.

[1] Bajoria, Jayshree (2011), “Libya and the Responsibility to Protect”, Council on Foreign Relations, http://www.cfr.org/libya/libya-responsibility-protect/p24480

Candidate 1: "Acting on a case-by-case basis does not establish an effective deterrent. If a leader does not know for certain that their action is going to lead to an intervention, they can’t be deterred. In order for them to be deterred, they need to know by which standards their actions will be assessed and acted upon. On a case-by-case basis, there is no such consistency established.

The UN needs to adopt an equal treatment of every country and situation under a responsibility to protect clause so that the least powerful in this world do not go unprotected."
Candidate 2: "It is not difficult to set up basic guidelines as to determining when a situation has gone too far. Even proponents of Responsibility to protect agree on certain criteria particularly right authority, just cause, right intention, last resort, proportional means and reasonable

Prospects. [1] The last of these criteria will rule out any intervention against a great power such as China where there would not be reasonable prospects of success unless disproportionate means (something like a preemptive nuclear strike) was used. Questions like ‘how many have to die?’ are therefore not asking the right questions because the loss of life could be relatively small (it also assumes that only killing matters) if all the criteria are fulfilled. While this would regrettably constrain any ‘responsibility to protect’ it would at the same time mean that R2P would not become an excuse for starting large scale wars.

[1] Evans, Gareth et al., The Responsibility to Protect, International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, December 2001, p.32 http://responsibilitytoprotect.org/ICISS%20Report.pdf"
Candidate 3: "That creates a slippery slope. When does the UN draw the line that a government has revoked its sovereignty? How many people have to die? How can it be justified that only if x number of people die, then we will intervene? Additionally, as soon as the UN gets involved in a civil war or dictatorship and has deemed the government no longer sovereign, then who is in charge? Is the UN going to set up a new government and country in the aftermath? That is a large commitment that such a large organization may not be able to execute no matter how ideal."
Candidate 4: "There is a procedural contradiction in the Proposition's position. If there is a universal responsibility to protect, why must this only be exercised through the United Nations, dependent upon Security Council recognition of a crisis and support for action? The United States believes that in some cases it would be right for individual states, or coalitions of the willing to take action to protect innocent life elsewhere in the world, even if the Security Council refused to deliver on its promises. Under the proposition, NATO's intervention in Kosovo in 1998/99 was wrong, and so was Vietnam's in Cambodia against the Khmer Rouge, Tanzania's in Uganda to stop Idi Amin's bloodshed, etc. - none of these had Security Council support."
Candidate 5: "Not all crises can be dealt with militarily. Often an invasion only creates more problems. Further is the UN ready to take on the underlying problems in cases of genocide and civil war. Those rifts may take decades to heal and is the UN truly invested because simply providing aid and military support will not solve the deep seated tensions in countries like the Sudan and Somalia [1] . Talk of prevention and of using non-military means to ensure states protect their own people properly is little different from existing UN commitments. The UN has failed in the past to head off humanitarian crises and there is nothing in the new Declarations to make it more likely to be successful in future. If the responsibility to protect means anything, it is to weaken the concept of sovereignty and make military intervention more likely.

[1] Genocide Intervention, “Sudan”, http://www.genocideintervention.net/area_of_concern/sudan"
Candidate 6: "The United Nations does have a problem raising sufficient money, troops and resources to meet its present needs for peacekeeping and humanitarian operations. This is precisely because all such operations are dealt with on a case-by-case basis - the approach so beloved of the opposition for dealing with any challenge. Without a clear global commitment to the Responsibility to Protect, the UN will always be scrabbling scrambling around to meet its needs in dealing with individual crises. Once there is clear agreement on the kind of situation which will in future prompt intervention, the UN can begin to plan ahead to build up resources, create contingency funds, and seek pledges of military units from member states, to be activated swiftly as needed. This could most easily be done regionally through the regional security organizations such as NATO and the African Union that it was originally intended would provide this kind of security. If the member states of one organization lacked some necessary equipment such as transport capacity they could borrow them from neighboring organizations."
Candidate 7: "The UN is the organization best equipped to deal with these types of interventions. If individual countries take action there are automatically thoughts of motive, and they can never be seen as a pure unbiased actor. Further, countries don’t want to take action because they do not want to become tied to the countries that they helped, whereas the UN does not have an aversion to commitment [1] . Having a strict framework directing intervention can prevent the UN from becoming the international government.

[1] Clarke, Walter; Herbst, Jeffrey (1996), “Somalia and the future of humanitarian intervention”, Foreign Affairs Magazine, http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~jwestern/ir317/clark.htm"
Candidate 8: "An apparently strong UN obligation to intervene in order to protect innocents will not necessarily provide a positive, deterrent effect. Rather, it could merely serve as an incentive for dictators and generals to commit their atrocities quicker. For example, when the United Nations first considered intervention in Libya, Colonel Qaddafi responded by strengthening the crackdown on protestors and preparing for an all-out assault on the Eastern town of Benghazi [1] . The intent to protect civilians in this case served only to increase the will of the leader to harm them. Furthermore, many of the nasty or failing regimes who might be fearful of intervention have a Security Council patron whom they can rely upon to prevent any action being taken against them. If the UN has an obligation to act to prevent atrocities such as genocide, then vetoes will be used to prevent the Security Council recognizing that such a situation exists in the first place. Though it has recently joined UN resolutions on Sudan, China blocked moves to impose sanctions on Sudan before 2007, largely due to favorable economic ties with the state [2] . Finally, this proposal may make atrocities more likely, by encouraging rebel groups to provoke ill-disciplined government forces into committing gross human rights violations, such as massacres, in the hope that such a response will draw in international forces on their own side.

[1] Buck, T. &amp; Clover, C. (2011), “Gaddafi launches assault on Benghazi”, Financial Times, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c4a0f746-5200-11e0-8a31-00144feab49a.html#axzz1XS8E2lxz

[2] BBC News (2007), “Chinese leader boosts Sudan ties”, BBC News, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/6323017.stm

Al Jazeera, 'China bolsters economic ties with Sudan', 29 June 2011, http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia-pacific/2011/06/201162952034878959.html"

It is not difficult to set up basic guidelines as to determining when a situation has gone too far. Even proponents of Responsibility to protect agree on certain criteria particularly right authority, just cause, right intention, last resort, proportional means and reasonable

Prospects. [1] The last of these criteria will rule out any intervention against a great power such as China where there would not be reasonable prospects of success unless disproportionate means (something like a preemptive nuclear strike) was used. Questions like ‘how many have to die?’ are therefore not asking the right questions because the loss of life could be relatively small (it also assumes that only killing matters) if all the criteria are fulfilled. While this would regrettably constrain any ‘responsibility to protect’ it would at the same time mean that R2P would not become an excuse for starting large scale wars.

[1] Evans, Gareth et al., The Responsibility to Protect, International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, December 2001, p.32 http://responsibilitytoprotect.org/ICISS%20Report.pdf
