The United Nations Human Rights Council established in December 2006 at a Special Session on human rights in Darfur a High Level Mission of five persons to assess the situation and to make recommendations.
The High Level Mission worked for one month, 5 February to 5 March 2007 in Geneva, Addis Ababa for meetings with African Union officials, and in the refugee camps in eastern Chad. The UN High Level Mission, despite frequent requests, was not given visas to enter Sudan.
The leader of the mission was Professor Judy Williams, the 1997 Nobel Peace Laureate for her work on a ban on the use of landmines. A key member was Professor Bertrand Ramcharan, former Acting High Commissioner for Human Rights and a leading specialist on UN procedures for human rights.
Concerning the situation in Darfur, the High Level Mission confirmed what is already well known from other UN reports and from humanitarian aid agencies. There is a high level of destruction, millions of people displaced, a large number of people killed, the refugee flows to Chad and the danger of the conflict spreading to Chad and the Central African Republic.
The High Level Mission also indicated that the responses of the Sudanese government are inadequate. Their report stated “Mechanisms of justice and accountability, where they exist, are under-resourced, politically compromised and ineffective. The region is heavily armed, further undercutting the rule of law, and meaningful disarmament and demobilization of the Janjaweed, other militias and rebel movements is yet to occur. Darfur suffers from longstanding economic marginalization and underdevelopment, and the conflict has resulted in further impoverishment.”
The most innovative aspect of the High Level Mission report was that the report was based on the principle of “The Responsibility to Protect”. This is, I believe, the first UN human rights study to structure itself on the concept of the Responsibility to Protect, and thus merits our close attention.
In a landmark decision at the UN-sponsored World Summit in September 2005, states formally embraced the principle of the responsibility to protect. In doing so, the World Summit declared that every state has the responsibility to protect its population from genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing. When a state is unable or unwilling to do so, it is the responsibility of the international community to take action to ensure effective protection. Subsequently, on 28 April 2006, the Security Council passed resolution 1674 reaffirming the provisions of paragraphs 138 and 139 of the 2005 World Summit Outcome document regarding the responsibility to protect.
As the High Level Mission report states “In assessing the human rights situation in Darfur and the needs of Sudan in that regard, and in formulating our recommendations, we considered that the effective protection of civilians in Darfur was the central issue at hand.”
The Responsibility to Protect at the UN grew out of the experiences of individual governments and the UN system as a whole in Rwanda, in ex-Yugoslavia, especially the killings at Srebrenica which had been designated as a UN-protected “safe haven” and the 1999 Kosovo conflict. The discussion began around the idea of the “right to intervene” put forward by Dr Bernard Kuchner, a founder of Doctors without Borders, later a French government minister of Health and Humanitarian Affairs, and then the UN administrator for Kosovo. Kuchner had begun his humanitarian work with the French Red Cross in the Nigeria-Biafra war of 1967-1970 where doctors had to work in Biafra without the agreement of the Nigerian Federal Government. The Red Cross system has a policy of rarely speaking out on the political situation where it works for fear of being limited in its medical work. Kuchner and friends who had worked in Biafra considered it their duty to speak out and to warn on conditions. Thus, they created a new organization willing to work where there is need with government permission or not. Doctors without Borders worked behind Soviet lines in Afghanistan. Kushner became a strong spokesman for the “right to intervene.”
However the moral outrage provoked by widespread human rights violations and humanitarian atrocities was feared by some states as being an open door to foreign intervention for power politics rather than for humanitarian reasons. The NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999 remains hotly disputed as to its motivations and its consequences. Did it trigger more problems than it prevented?
When the UN faces a difficult intellectual issue without clear answers, it helps set up an independent commission to study the issue. A commission with members from different cultures and experiences can reach a compromise that may be acceptable to a wide range of countries. As a commission is independent, if governments do not like the recommendations, they can let a commission report fade away offending few. Thus on the issue of the “right to intervene” — with finance and secretariat help from the Canadian government — the “International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty” was set up in 2000 and made its report to the UN in December 2001.
The Commission had two co-chairs, Gareth Evans, who as Foreign Minister of Australia (1988-1996) had played an active role in UN issues, and Mohamed Sahnoun of Algeria, a long time Ambassador having served as Deputy Secretary General of both the Arab League and the Organization of African Unity before becoming a UN “trouble shooter”. As the Commission report notes “This report is about the so-called ‘right of humanitarian intervention’: the question of when, if ever, it is appropriate for states to take coercive - and in particular military – action against another state for the purpose of protecting people at risk in that other state. The issue of intervention for human protection purposes has been seen as one of the most controversial and difficult of all international relations questions.”
The skill of the Commission is seen in its reversal of the ‘right to intervene’ to the ‘duty to protect,’ a duty which falls first of all to the state to protect its own people. The Commission report sets out its two basic principles: “A. State sovereignty implies responsibility, and the primary responsibility for the protection of its people lies with the state itself. B. Where a population is suffering serious harm, as a result of internal war, insurgency, repression or state failure, and the state in question is unwilling or unable to halt or avert it, the principle of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect.”
The Commission’s report The Responsibility to Protect moves the discussion away from a narrow focus on the use of military force for humanitarian protection to look at the role of the broader international community to react when states are unable or unwilling to protect.
Darfur illustrates the difficulties in converting the principles of the responsibility to protect into a program of action. The goal should be to “operationalize” the responsibility to protect by building the UN’s capacity to respond early and effectively.
In a second article I will analyse the specific recommendations of the High Level Mission on Darfur and the response of the Human Rights Council.
René Wadlow is also editor of the online journal of world politics www.transnational-perspectives.org and an NGO representative to the UN, Geneva. Formerly, he was professor and Director of Research of the Graduate Institute of Development Studies, University of Geneva.
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The United Nations Human Rights Council established in December 2006 at a Special Session on human rights in Darfur a High Level Mission of five persons to assess the situation and to make recommendations. 
The three post-war scenarios regarding EU-US relations
