The worldwide humanitarian and legal IDP problem: responsibility to protect or to protect state sovereignty?

According to the Internal displacement monitoring centre of the Norwegian Refugee Council, the total conflict related Internally displaced persons (IDP) population in the world was 26 million in December 2007, spread over at least 52 countries. This figure is the highest one since the early 1990’s, and marks a 6 percent increase from the 2006 figure. The IDP population worldwide is thus rising. Although there are national, intergovernmental and non-governmental organisations capable of dealing with IDPs and the problem of IDPs is well known and worldwide, IDPs are in a state of general neglect while their numbers are enormous. This attempts to explain this worrying situation by exploring the tension between the concepts of “state sovereignty” and “responsibility to protect”. The general goal of this thesis is to come to an analysis and explanation of the IDP problem within an International Relations Theory framework. The leading research question in this thesis is: How can the worldwide humanitarian and legal IDP problem from 1950 up until 2009 be characterised and to what extent can this be explained by the lasting tension between the concepts of “state sovereignty” and “responsibility to protect”? The first chapter addresses the causes, conceptual definition, contemporary background numbers and basic problems of IDPs. The general causes of internal displacement are armed conflict, situations of generalised violence, violations of human rights, or natural or human-made disaster. What is striking about recent figures, is that forced internal displacement in the last decade was caused by internal rather than international armed conflicts. People were mainly displaced by government forces and allied groups, as well as by rebel groups fighting them. IDPs comprise a very large group of people in need of humanitarian assistance since they are among the most vulnerable people in the world. All the more worrying is that neither the UNHCR, nor any other institution has a generally accepted legal basis on which to interfere on behalf of IDPs inside the borders of any country. This means that many IDPs still fall through the cracks of the humanitarian response system. Although UNHCR has assisted IDPs in an ad hoc manner, in other situations it has resisted assisting IDPs. Developing a legal basis for assisting IDPs to fill this protection gap has been extremely difficult because many believe that no agency should intervene in the sovereign business of states. Others believe, however, that IDPs are entitled to the same aid as refugees, since they find themselves in the same humanitarian need for assistance as refugees do. Apart from a legal basis for humanitarian involvement with IDPs, the main reference points of international law for IDPs until now are the Guiding Principles and the African Union Convention. Although the Guiding Principles are basically restatements of existing international humanitarian and human rights law and they are widely accepted by states as well as international organisations and institutions, they are not legally binding. This means that there is no specific international law document, except for the African Union Convention, designed explicitly for IDPs that can be referred to in judicial proceedings. The African Union Convention is a step in the right direction and may well become the first legally binding treaty on IDPs, but it has only been signed by several African Union states recently and has yet to be ratified by 15 of those states. Apart from the lack of legal basis for humanitarian involvement with IDPs, there seems to be a political unwillingness to create a new agency to replace or complement UNHCR. This unwillingness comes from both within UNHCR and other actors such as states and other agencies, who either believe that one single agency would not have the capacity to meet the needs of all IDPs or are afraid that one such agency would have too much political influence. The humanitarian assistance problem concerning IDPs thus not only stems from a lack of legal basis, but also from a lack of political willingness to create responsibility for providing that assistance. Within UNHCR, criteria for involvement seem to be worded in such a way as to avoid formal commitment, while allowing for the flexibility to get involved in IDP emergencies which are considered to be politically important to address. For the time being, no agency is explicitly responsible for the wellbeing of all IDPs except for state governments. In chapter 4, explanations are offered for the problems with creating a mandate for the assistance of IDPs, developing binding international law on their behalf and the lack of political will from organisations as well as states to commit to assisting them. It has become clear that today’s political world is still based on the Westphalian system of states. Although the past decades have seen the growth of international cooperation, law and institutions on human rights and humanitarian law as well as on other terrains, the principles of sovereignty and non-interference are still highly important for many states and scholars. The current international order represents a fundamental clash between, on the one hand, the inherited norms of the Westphalia system, most of which privilege the particularistic values associated with the state and, on the other, the more recently established norms which appear to promote universal values, most obviously in the area of human rights. The responsibility to protect doctrine, developed by the ICISS in 2001, implies that interference (whether military intervention or not) for human protection purposes is based in the double belief that the sovereignty of a state has an accompanying responsibility on the part of that state; and that if the state defaults on the responsibility to protect its citizens, then the fallback responsibility to do so must be assumed and discharged by the international community. This doctrine has, however, met a lot of resistance. Part of this resistance stems from the fact that the responsibility to protect doctrine is often mistaken for a new label for humanitarian intervention, which is mostly thought of as military intervention. Intervention in the military sense is, however, only one of many possibilities expressed by the responsibility to protect doctrine. Assisting IDPs would generally not fall within the scope of military intervention, but would be part of the responsibility to protect. The apparent fear that the responsibility to protect doctrine is merely another name for humanitarian intervention (in the military sense) makes it extremely difficult for the doctrine to be generally accepted and implemented. The enormous differences that exist between those who advocate the responsibility to protect and those who are against it because it would diminish the principles of state sovereignty and non-interference can be explained by the huge gap that exists between those who view the world from a Realist point and those who view it from a Cosmopolitan point. The former see states as the principle units comprising the international system and the main goals are the survival and security of the state and maintaining or improving the state’s position in the world order. The realist norms are based on sovereignty and distinction between the domestic and the international, and they cannot be sustained if human rights are to be judged in the light of international standards. The focus of Cosmopolitanism refers to the idea that all human beings have equal moral standing within a single world community. The individual human being is, thus, the ultimate object of moral concern; all individuals have an equal moral status, and no one can elude from the obligation to this universal recognition. Cosmopolitan thinkers envisage a world order in which the gulf between domestic and international politics is reduced or eliminated. When comparing Realist and Cosmopolitan or Pluralist and Solidarist versions of international relations theory, the irreconcilability of those who think in terms of states and order and those who think in terms of human beings and justice becomes apparent. This may be a good explanation for the tension between the concepts of absolute state sovereignty and advocates of the responsibility to protect doctrine. The findings in this thesis research matter because in today’s world, humanitarian crises are increasing due to the increase of situations of internal destabilisation. These situations of internal stabilisation have boundary-crossing effects. The international community cannot turn its back on this accelerating development on the grounds of a legal divide between external and internal matters. There is no longer a clear-cut boundary between the national and the international when it comes to conflicts and the associated humanitarian crises. A considerable part of these crises is the enormous number of IDPs across the world. The IDP problematic is an international problem that should be accordingly addressed by the international community.