"The parliament of nations"

Yesterday, 24th of September, the United Nations General Assembly 68th edition was inaugurated.
The General Assembly of the United nations is the main representative organ and it mainly carries out policy-making tasks. Every year representants from the 193 forming the UN gather together to try to bring some light to next challenges that need to be addressed from a global perspective. The discussion in the fórum addresses different issues covered by the UN Charter and it provides the op

portunity to listen to different points of view or solutions to solve the same problems.

The Assembly elects a President each year, this year the UN Ambassador of Antigua and Barbuda, Jon Ashe, was elected to perform this task. The new president declared after being elected the 14 of June that two of his main goals for this 68th edition were "overcoming poverty and ensuring sustainable development"; two challenges that thus will be addressed during this General Assembly.

The Assembly has certain rules of procedure and vote. In order to make decissions all the issues are discussed prior to the votation. When it comes to vote, each country has one vote, granted that they paid their due economic contribution to the organization; but some member states, due to their special conditions might be granted the right to vote even if the are delayed in their payments, if they can provide with enough justification.

The resolutions taken on the main questions such as: admission of new members, budgetary matters or peace and security measures, need to be voted by 2/3 of the majority. Other questions will only require a simple majority to pass.

Due to security reasons general public is no admitted during the sessions, but all the sessions are public and you can follow them live at this website http://www.un.org/en/ga/ .There you can also find further information about draft proposals, voting records, etc.
You can enjoy this sessions until the 1st of October, when the closing session will take place.

Libya and the Political Isolation Law

Now that Syria occupies the front news almost every day we seem to have forgotten about Libya, a country still trying to overcome a terrible civil war.

Only a few months ago, the fifth of June, the Political Isolation Law came into force. This legislation received harsh critics from both "sides" of the conflict.
     This law states certain measures to avoid that individuals belonging to Gaddafi's regime occupy public positions in the country. We could agree on the fact that in order to change and overcome the last four decades of regime, a change is needed, and Libyan institutions need to be leaded by personnel willing to change the country and to cooperate in a transtition towards a solid democracy. And that is the core of the argument held by its supporters.

    From now on any individual related to Gadaffi's regime (at any momment during the four decades) , or national law-enforcement officials, or military and police officers for instance will be banned from belonging to the new Lybian institution for the next 10 years.
And how do they assess whether a person had collaborated with Gadaffi's regimes? The criteria stipulated by the law are pretty vague and can lead to unjustifiable discriminations, some of the criteria were simply having done business with a member of his family or for instance not having supported the 17th of February revolution.

Another criticized part was the provision that allows the armed militias to use force in order to influence tha lawmaking process. But if an interim parliament's main function is being able to establish a constituent assembly to draft the new Lybian constitution; why should the army need to coerce it? . If in this case the militar forces needed to pressure the transitional assembly to pass the law, that means that population's opinions and desires are not being reflected in the legislation approved in the country.

More than a pacific transtitional law designed for lead the country to prosperity and democracy as soon as possible, it seems to be a text coated by fear and rancor, that will make it more difficult for Liby
an institutions to develop and work for a better future, since they will lack from Lybian professionals who have been working there for years, who have created and designed this institutions, and that will be removed from their positions following vague and imprecise criteria.

What is Responsibility to Protect?

The example of Syria, as many others before, casts doubts about what should the international comunity understand for sovereignty of states. Should the international community allow any government attack its own civilians?Should we act instead? 

The United Nations Charter was signed in 1945 regarding another concept of what in international law was understood as sovereignty, thus many of its articles reflect the importance of respecting the integrity of states as the only sovereigns and allow military intervention only in cases of international conflict.

Chapter VII of the Charter contains the cases in which the Security Council could allow the use of force in order to “maintain or restore international peace and security”(article 39 Charter), thus anything is said about internal conflicts that affect only one state. When we are not in front of an international conflict we can't apply these rules. 

That seems deceiving , specially because after the signature of this Charter the international community has witnessed situations where an international action was needed in order to protect civilians from their own government, however Chapter VII does not recognize the right of the UN Security Council to allow the use of force in these cases, even to protect civilians. 

But after the Cold War the UN Security Council allowed the use of force in order to address some of these threats supporting its position in the fact that certain intervention was legitimate since  human rights violations in these cases were also threatening international peace and security, some of the most important cases are the intervention in Iraq in 1991, the intervention in Somalia in 1992, and the intervention in the Former Yugoslavia in 1992 and in Rwanda in 1994, conflicts that we will adress in this blog in further posts.

But in 1999 the effectiveness of the UN model to face and finish off human rights threatens was called into question with the case of Kosovo, when the veto system of the UN Security Council blocked the possibility of allowing the use of force. Hence NATO intervened without a previous authorization of UN bypassing the international organization in order to protect the civilians.

      After these occurrences raised the necessity of a new concept of international intervention in cases where civilians needed to be protected from their own governments in their own countries. The Secretary General Kofi Annan challenged the states to lay out a new concept of national sovereignty. An ad hoc commission was created by Gareth Evans, with the consent of Canadian Foreign Minister Loyd Axworthy,  in order to face this challenge, it was calledthe International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS).

      The ICISS Commission came up with the Responsibility to Protect concept where the first responsibility of protecting the rights and lives of civilians relies on the sovereign state. But it set out  what happens in cases where the state fails in the responsibility to protect its own civilians or it is the own state the perpetrator of violence against them.

But, doesn't this concept clash with the concept of Sovereign States? 

The concept of R2P considers the sovereign state as the first actor responsible for the protection of its own citizens, and only if the state is unable or unwilling to protect their own citizens it arises the responsibility of other states to act in the place of the failing state. This idea is shown in the Basic principles stated in the ICISS report :

“State sovereignty implies responsibility, and the primary responsibility for the

protection of its people lies with the state itself.

 Where a population issuffering serious harm, as a result of internal war, insurgency,

repression orstate 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”

From the reading of these principles the first conclusion we reach is that the concept of sovereignty has some differences with the concept of sovereignty as it was understood by the time the Charter was written.

    Hideaki Shinoda  makes an interesting definition of sovereignty as a two-sided concept. On one hand we talk about internal sovereignty as the exclusive competence of the state to make decisions with regard to its territory and its citizens. On the other hand there is a external point of view defining sovereignty as the identity of the state on legal basis according to  international law, meaning the state as the solely owner of the capacity of representing its citizens in front of the international community and the right to hold an equality status with regard to the other states. 

Can this classical definition of sovereignty fit in the idea of sovereignty as the duty of the sovereign state to protect its civilians and as the right of international community to intervene whether the sovereign state fails in its duty?

With this question posed I finish this post, we will keep talking about this issue in future posts. 

The Whistleblower

Hi everyone!Now that the weather is becoming colder, is there anything better than watching a movie under your blanket?.
I would like to recommend you: The Whistleblower. This movie, inspired by actual events, takes place in the Bosnian post-war, during a UN peacekeeping operation.
Kathryn Bolkovac, the main character, is a cop in Lincoln (Nebraska), her boss proposes her to work at the UN International police during six months in Bosnia and he accepts.
After some months working there, she discovers that some members of the UN peacekeeping operation are involved in sex trafficking of underage girls and go freqently to brothels.

Horrified by this finding she tries to denounce the situation inside the organization. But the truth is that they have been covering it up in order to protect the organization as a whole and protect security contracts.
After trying to solve the problem by her own means she is fired and comes back home, where she decides to bring the scandal to light throughout the BBC.

Here is a link to one of the interviews that The Telegraph made public last year: interview of Kathyrn-Bolkovac (by Alastair Good).

INTERNATIONAL AGENDA

For those of you who don't want to miss a single international event I would like I would recommend you to visit the World Events Calendar. This Calendar is public by the Council on Foreign Relations and it contains the most relevant events, offering even a little description. It is organized by months so that you can check which one fits in with your personal agenda! From now on you won't have an excuse to miss any of them.

Here is the website of the Council of Foreign Relations: http://www.cfr.org/publication/world_events_calendar.html  

International Day of Democracy

Today, 15 of September,  is the International Day of Democracy; proclaimed by the UN General Assembly the 8 of November of 2007.
Celebrations are welcomed but we have to think of the all the work that is still to be done. How many countries are actual democracies nowadays?
The concept of democracy has blurried barriers, thus in most of the cases it is difficult to determine whether we are in front of a real democracy or a system where only some aspects of democracy are taken in consideration.

The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU)  measures the state of democracy in 167 worldwide through the socalled "Democracy Index". Using 60 different indicators it rates the countries on a scale from 1 to 10. According to the index made public in 2013, only 25 countries can be considered as "full democracies", which embrace only 11.3% of the world's population; whilst 37 countries were deemed as "authoritarian regimes", controlling over 37% of the global population.

As a result of the Arab Spring and the consequent changes in regimes and the flourishment of new transitional goverments towards democracy, we could infer that democracy has undergo a big growth worldwide. But that would be a hasty assumption.
According to Laza Kekic, head of the EIU regional team, "In 2012 global democracy was at a standstill in the sense that there was neither significant progress nor regression in levels of democracy worldwide".

And why is that happening? The report attribute this cause to a diverse number of reasons. Most important and surprising reasons are due to new policies implemented by western countries. For instance the global financial recession that we are suffering since around 2007, have had as a result the designation of decision-making to unelected technocracts, instead of atributing them to democratically elected leaders. The most notable cases have taken place in the eurozone, where countries such as Italy, Ireland or Spain have carried out these policies.

Another main reason for the decline of democracy standards in western societies according to this report has been the sacrifice of certain civil rights, contraining them in the name of the maintenance of national security. Other countries are suffering a sharp decline of voters participation and keep fighting to maintain a democratic system. With countries like USA occupying the 21st position, or Belgium placed in the 24th position in the rank.

The good news are that comparing the EIU Democracy Index of 2012 the score increased for 54 ccountries. Among them, Libya experiences the biggest increase. And the Middle East and _North Africa countries increased their scores by more than a point, thanks to the transition from authoritarian to hybrid regimes of Libya, Egypt and Morocco.

If you still want to know more check the report's text at: https://portoncv.gov.cv/dhub/porton.por_global.open_file?p_doc_id=1034

Welcome!

Hello everyone! I am excited to present this new blog "International Relations for Dummies". Do you often wonder what is going on beyond the barriers of your country? Did you ever feel like you couldn't catch up on a conversation about international news? With this blog, I propose you to spend five minutes of your day on figuring out what is going on in the planet. Soon you will discover how exciting it can be. It will be fun! I promise.