Panel to Offer Guidelines for U.N. Intervention

A Canadian-led commission on Thursday launched an effort to help the U.N. decide whether to step in when a country faces a crisis within its borders, even if the intervention is unwanted.

The independent commission will produce guidelines for U.N. action to stop tragedies in the making, while heeding the objections of such countries as Russia and China, which believe that internal conflicts are not international affairs.

But the task of defining the line between human rights and sovereign rights has become contentious.

“The debate has become extremely polarized,” said Gareth Evans, a former foreign minister of Australia and one of the chairmen of the panel. The panel’s goal is to find common ground between interference and indifference.

“What on earth do we do if we find ourselves facing another Rwanda, another Srebrenica?” Evans asked Thursday. “Is it possible to craft some new approach to make it possible for the Security Council to reach some kind of consensus?”

Secretary-General Kofi Annan is haunted by a series of humanitarian disasters that the U.N. had neither the force nor will to prevent: Opposition from the United States and doubts about the severity of ethnic fighting delayed the deployment of U.N. peacekeepers to Rwanda, where more than 800,000 people were massacred in 1994. Outnumbered and unarmed peacekeepers in Bosnia-Herzegovina failed to stop the killing of Muslims when Serbs overran the U.N. “safe area” of Srebrenica in l995.

In the hopes that he would never again have to say “never again,” Annan declared last year that the world’s duty to stop genocide should override the legal notion of sovereignty.

“If humanitarian intervention is indeed an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond . . . to gross and systematic violations of human rights that offend every precept of our common humanity?” Annan wrote in his Millennium Report this year.

But a bloc of mostly developing nations contend that what happens within their borders is their own affair. This view also has won support among lawmakers in the U.S. Congress who are wary of the erosion of the principle of national sovereignty.

Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy organized the independent panel to tackle the issue because humanitarian intervention is such a sensitive topic within the United Nations. The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty will present a volume of nonbinding recommendations to the U.N. by next September.

The commission is co-chaired by two former foreign ministers, Evans and Mohamed Sahnoun of Algeria, and funded by the Canadian government and three U.S. organizations--the Carnegie Corp., the MacArthur Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. It includes scholars, diplomats, activists and politicians representing all sides of the debate; countries opposed to the concept of intervention that do not have a representative on the commission will be engaged privately.

“I think people are receptive to the idea and [will] say, ‘At least let’s have an honest look at this,’ and not try to push it under the rug,” Axworthy said.