THE RIGHT TO LIFE

By Louise Arbour and - - Reprint | | Print |

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GENEVA, Feb 2 2006 (IPS) - At the conclusion of the World Summit in New York last September, all member states of the United Nations accepted the principle that national governments have the primary responsibility for preventing crimes against humanity, war crimes, genocide, and ethnic cleansing, writes Louise Arbour, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. In this article, Arbour writes that the responsibility to protect focuses on preventing abuses as much as, if not more, than on intervening once those abuses are already underway. In today\’s world the greatest threat to the right to life is neither war nor arbitrary killing. Each year, about 530,000 women die in pregnancy or in childbirth, and more than 10 million children die before their fifth birthday. Worldwide, AIDS killed more than 3 million people last year alone. These deaths constitute human rights violations and are as much an affront and a threat to human security, as are arbitrary detention or torture. They represent an equally flagrant abuse of the right to life for those affected, threaten security and stifle human development. And they are equally demanding of an urgent response, at national, regional and international levels.

By committing to take responsibility for protection, the international community has acknowledged for the first time that serious human rights violations in and of themselves require an international response, regardless of whether or not they constitute a threat to international peace and security as classically understood.

It is too early to say whether this step constitutes a real breakthrough in our approach to defending the right to life. Political commitments are meaningful only to the extent that they are acted on in practice. One may question whether the United Nations –by which I mean the Member States– currently has the real capacity and the will to fulfil this obligation to protect in the face of defaulting states.

But in a sense, this is precisely the significance of the undertaking. The concept of the responsibility to protect articulates a basis for intervention in the face of our continued tolerance for violations of the right to life.

The right to life is the corner stone of all other human rights. It constitutes an inherent and ”supreme” right that reflects the most central values of humankind: self-preservation and dignity. Ensuring that this right is realised in full will provide the surest means available to prevent the recurrence of the kinds of mass violations that World Summit was seeking to halt.

For that reason, conceiving of the responsibility to protect only in the context of the four international crimes I mentioned above, as serious and heinous as these are, misses the point and unduly trammels our thinking.

Arguably, poverty, hunger, educational deficits, restricted access to health, inequitable distribution of resources, discrimination, and an absence or erosion of justice and of the rule of law generate more insecurity, lead to more instability and endanger more lives than those ultimate violations on which the responsibility to protect currently focuses.

As long as we continue to remain within the confines of the old, unspoken orthodoxies which view human rights as inherently intrusive and antithetical to state interests; as so long as we continue to view human rights violations as being of concern only when committed on a scale such as to threaten international peace and security; and, in this regard, as long as we remain blind to the fact that the root of our collective security lies in our individual well-being, then the rhetoric of New York will amount to nothing.

Yet there are causes for optimism.

First, there has been real progress in reconciling respect for state sovereignty with the understanding that such a concept does not relieve the international community of its responsibility to protect human rights and punish those guilty of mass human rights violations.

And second, the responsibility to protect focuses on preventing abuses as much as, if not more, than on intervening once those abuses are already underway. In 1998, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan declared that the 21st century ”must be the age of prevention”. I see the responsibility to protect as a declaration of a common preventive policy, one which will address not only manifest violations of the right to life but also their root causes and that this approach is required for reasons of law, morality and efficiency.

In today’s world the greatest threat to the right to life is neither war nor arbitrary killing. Each year, about 530,000 women die in pregnancy or in childbirth, and more than 10 million children die before their fifth birthday. More than one billion people lack access to safe water and 2.6 billion lack access to improved sanitation. These factors contribute to the spread of diseases, which kill an estimated 3,900 children every day. Twenty-five million people are currently living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa, of whom only 4 percent have access to the medicines they need to survive. Worldwide, AIDS killed more than 3 million people last year alone.

These deaths constitute human rights violations and are as much an affront and a threat to human security, as are arbitrary detention or torture. They represent an equally flagrant abuse of the right to life for those affected, threaten security and stifle human development. And they are equally demanding of an urgent response, at national, regional and international levels. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)