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The Responsibility to Protect and Counter-Terrorism

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Fresh Perspectives
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The Responsibility to Protect and Counter-Terrorism

Dr Shannon Zimmerman writes on the relationship between R2P and counter-terrorism. She argues that both doctrines are compatible where emphasis is placed on protecting human rights.

 

The relationship between counterterrorism and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is a complicated one. States struggle to find a balance between addressing potential and imminent terrorist threats and observing human rights. The ‘Global War on Terror’ has seen human right violations justified by the existential necessities of national security. At the same time, acts of terrorism may constitute crimes against humanity as one of the four atrocity crimes listed under R2P.

This has placed the international community in an uncomfortable position: international law requires observance and protection of human rights, yet resolutions passed by the UN Security Council require international support to states countering terrorist threats. However, a closer look at the UN frameworks focused on countering terrorism reveals striking, and increasing, similarities between those efforts and the framework underpinning the R2P.

There are several common priorities between R2P and counterterrorism, such as the primacy of sovereignty and sovereign responsibility, the importance of human rights – including when addressing issues of terrorism, and the emerging prioritization of prevention. When leveraged appropriately, these overlaps make it possible for interveners to address the conditions that lead to both terrorism and atrocity crimes, particularly by focusing on the protection of civilians.

 

Counter-Terrorism and R2P

R2P and counter-terrorism frameworks have evolved parallel to each other within the United Nations. R2P was first articulated as a framework in the 2001 International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. The same year, shortly before the report was released, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 occurred.  It soon became clear that nascent articulations of R2P focused on individual human rights would struggle to compete with military-heavy approaches to counterterrorism.

The ‘war on terror’ framed terrorism as an act of war that demanded extraordinary actions by the state. This was facilitated by UN Security Council Resolution 1375, which required states ratify existing treaties against terrorism and take responsibility for preventing acts of terrorism. However, resolution 1375 made no mention of human rights. This gave the impression that efforts to counter terrorism had to be balanced against the state’s role of protecting its civilians and that the latter may have to be sacrificed to achieve the former.

In response to state abuses in the name of counter-terrorism, the 2004 High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change responded to state abuses by noting that heavy-handed approaches to countering terrorism undermined the very principles that terrorists themselves hoped to repudiate. The High-Level panel recommended that the UN Secretary General take a more active approach in designing strategies to counter-terrorism to ensure adherence to the rule of law. In September 2006, the UN adopted a Global Counter-Terrorism strategy (GCTS). The framework provided by the GCTS strongly echoes the principles that are the basis of R2P.

 

The R2P Framework

  1. The state has a responsibility to protect its own populations from the crimes of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity.
  2. The role and responsibilities of the international community to assist the state in fulfilling its responsibilities.
  3. The role of the international community to act when protection by the state is manifestly failing.

The Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy

  1. Addressing the conditions conducive to the spread of terrorism.
  2. Measures to prevent and combat terrorism.
  3. Measures to build states’ capacity to prevent and combat terrorism and to strengthen the role of the United Nations system in that regard.
  4. Measures to ensure respect for human rights for all and the rule of law as the fundamental basis for the fight against terrorism.

 

The GCTS specifically notes that states must take “[m]easures to ensure respect for human rights for all and the rule of law as the fundamental basis for the fight against terrorism.” Indicating the importance of human rights in counter-terrorism efforts, the UN Secretary-General made it clear that, “[e]ffective counter-terrorism measures and the protection of human rights are not conflicting goals, but complementary and mutually reinforcing ones.”

 

Where R2P and CT Overlap: Sovereignty and International Obligations

R2P and the Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy (GCTS) both emphasise the principle of sovereignty and advocate for a ‘first responder’ role of the state as the security provider. Only then do they move beyond the state to articulate the responsibilities of the international community in assisting states in protecting civilians and non-combatants from harm, up to and including, acting without host-state consent.

The R2P pillars refer not just to protection but also prevention of atrocity crimes. Similarly, the GCTS refers to supporting states in countering terrorism but emphasises doing so while observing human rights obligations. Put more simply, both frameworks recognize the importance of building state capacity to reinforce sovereignty and prevent terrorism, or atrocity crimes.

 

Increasing Congruences

When the UN Secretary-General released a new Plan of Action for Preventing Violent Extremism in December 2015 the plan re-emphasised efforts to address root causes of terrorism. This move has pushed counterterrorism efforts ‘upstream’ to focus on prevention and addressing the factors that lead to terrorist attacks. At the acute stage, both terrorism and atrocity crimes are preceded by threats toward marginalized groups, plans or policies to attack a civilian population, economic and political exclusion, dehumanizing rhetoric and human rights violations. The UN secretary-general has directly connected extremist views with those who commit genocide and atrocities. By focusing on prevention, international actors can simultaneously address factors shared by terrorism and atrocity crimes by focusing on civilian protection.

An examination of R2P and counterterrorism has shown that these frameworks have a shared conceptual basis and the ‘preventative’ turn in countering terror has brought R2P and counterterrorism closer into alignment than they have ever been. This presents an opportunity to leverage the synergies between these two frameworks and align resources with an emphasis on human rights and prevention: A win/win scenario for both counterterrorism and R2P advocates.

Shannon Zimmerman is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University, and a Research Fellow at the Asia Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect.

 

Image credit: https://peacekeeping.un.org/en

 

If you are interested in submitting a blog post for the ECR2P’s Fresh Perspectives series, then please contact Dr Richard Illingworth by Email (r.illingworth@leeds.ac.uk) or Twitter (@RJI95).