UN is paralysed as Syrians’ human rights are violated with impunity

Medical journal The Lancet publishes powerful plea for the world to intervene to stop crime against humanity

One of the world’s leading medical journals, The Lancet, published an exceptionally powerful plea earlier in March for the world to intervene to stop one of the most searing humanitarian catastrophes playing out with such monstrous impunity in Syria.

In the most recent round of fighting, which started on February 21, hundreds of people were killed and more than 1,550 civilians were injured, many deliberately. A total 25 hospitals and health centres have been hit, reducing capacity to 50% when patients most need care. Physicians for Human Rights found that the unspeakable suffering was deliberately planned and meticulously implemented. The Syrian American Medical Society estimates that more than 1,000 critically ill patients now need medical evacuation, but the Syrian government has allowed only 37 to proceed.

Children have paid the heaviest price in the conflict. Their suffering has deteriorated to such a degree that the UN International Children’s Emergency Fund (Unicef) published a statement bereft of words because there are none left to describe the sheer horror of the situation. Five years ago, the people of Ghouta, outside Damascus, endured a deadly sarin chemical attack that killed 1,466 people, of whom 426 were children. In the current round of the conflict Syrian forces, with Russian support, have relentlessly bombarded Eastern Ghouta and killed hundreds of civilians, half of whom are believed to have been children. Since the war began almost 6-million children have needed humanitarian assistance, with almost half having been forced to flee their homes.

The UN Security Council has failed the people of Syria, and world leaders seem paralysed in the face of what by anyone’s reckoning is an epic crime against humanity. For almost 100 years, since Eglantyne Jebb and the 1924 Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child, there has been a recognition of the obligation of nations to protect children. The 189 countries that are signatories to the 2002 UN resolution S-27/2 A World Fit for Children conclude with the commitment “to spare no effort in continuing with the creation of a world fit for children”.

Unicef, to its everlasting credit, has done everything in its power to go to the frontlines of conflict to protect children’s lives. The UN High Commission for Refugees has stretched its limited resources to look after millions of refugees. The International Red Cross and Medicines Sans Frontiers put their own employees’ lives in peril while saving the lives of children under siege.

But this is nowhere nearly enough. Convoys bringing humanitarian relief reached 22,000 trapped people a month — compared to the 2017 monthly average of 175,000, which summarises the scale of what is not getting done.

Much like military operations, the world’s response must surely be proportionate to the scale of the disaster, supported by a bold and resolute UN Security Council able to grasp the magnitude of its moral responsibility. Multilateral interventions are not only legal but normative. In the Question of Intervention: John Stuart Mill & the Responsibility to Protect (2015), Columbia University’s Michael Doyle argued that “[T]he process of multilateral decision-making embedded in the UN Security Council by article 39 of chapter 7 gives the council the authority to — indeed, requires that the council ‘shall’ — determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace or act of aggression and take whatever action — including coercive embargoes and forcible measures by land, air or sea — that the council sees fit.”

What is to be done? The Lancet editorial comment outlines three courses of action (and I add one more):

Citizens and health professionals must rise up and press government officials to act now to end the UN Security Council paralysis to impose severe sanctions on the aggressors;

All of those with influence, small and large, must join hands in mounting an unremitting call for an end to attacks on health facilities, personnel and patients and the protection of civilians;

The UN Secretariat must become much more deliberate and strategic in its effort to ensure that medical evacuations take place and the flow of aid receives the highest priority; and

Every country must open or reopen its borders to Syrian families with children under siege.

Article 39 of chapter 7 of the UN Charter states that “no intervention should be contemplated unless it is requested by those in most need of it”. Civil groups in Syria have made the call repeatedly. Those in need include children, who have the same moral standing as adults but lack the legal capacity and resources to act in their own interests.

The school children of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, have been able to exercise moral agency following the recent mass murder of their classmates, in demanding change in the face of adult handwringing and equivocation. But the children of Ghouta have no such equivalent capacity to act in their interests to stop the relentless murder of their playmates and families.

The UN Charter provides for procedural legitimacy by requiring nine of 15 members of the security council, the highest decision-making body of the UN, to vote in favour of a resolution brought by a member. But any one of the five permanent members — China, France, Russia, the UK and the US — has the power of veto to block its passage. Russia has vetoed 10 previous UN resolutions on Syria and has consistently used its permanent seat on the security council to protect Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from being accountable for what are clearly war crimes.

On February 22, Russia likewise vetoed a ceasefire resolution brought by Sweden and Kuwait on the grounds that it was fed by “mass hysteria”, a profoundly unkind and unsympathetic manner of describing the media coverage and depiction of the situation on the ground. A watered-down resolution was passed unanimously by the council on February 24 but, perhaps unsurprisingly, it was so weak that the ceasefire was broken a few days after its passage.

The stalemate highlighted the urgent need to change the way in which the UN Security Council deals with crimes against humanity and genocide. The proposal has been made that in such cases the five permanent members of the council should surrender their rights of veto. Given that the UN’s international duty to protect is a normative and not just a legal presumptive requirement, it is high time that the proposal is taken seriously.

It cannot be that the world’s only assembly of governments becomes complicit in the very crimes it is obliged to prevent and stop, by remaining trapped in a system of governance that is out of step with humanity’s needs.