The Libyan crisis is the first practical application under United Nations Security Council (UNSC) international peacekeeping powers of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine. This is cause for celebration.
In his two terms (1997–2006), former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan tirelessly encouraged an apprehensive UN membership to accept this momentous advance in international peacekeeping practice. Two Australian foreign ministers, Gareth Evans and, during the past month, Kevin Rudd, have advocated in favour of this doctrine.
The UN, like its toothless pre-WW2 predecessor the League of Nations, was established as a voluntary association of freely consenting sovereign states. But the UN Charter included a Security Council with powers to promptly exercise agreed military force against any state which launched unprovoked aggression on another state, thus creating a threat to international peace and security.
The UNSC peacekeeping procedures offer in themselves no built-in rapid sanctions against regimes that treat their own citizens with extreme cruelty. By the time UN human rights-based international diplomacy cranks into action, millions of people can perish at the hands of evil governments.
We saw this in the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia in 1975–79, the Bosnian Serb regime's murder of thousands of Bosnian Muslims in 1992–95, and the 1994 Rwanda genocide.
Annan argued that all states' national sovereignty should be conditional on their fulfilling a responsibility to protect the 'individual sovereignty', i.e. human rights, of their own citizens, and that regimes which violate these rights forfeit their right to be treated as sovereign states.
This concept harks back to long-hallowed Judaeo-Christian-Islamic precepts that rulers are required to govern their peoples justly and in accordance with natural law.
Gaddafi's threats late last week of bloody reprisals against people in the last remaining besieged rebel cities of Benghazi and Tobruk, and his continuing attacks on these cities using tanks and heavy artillery in direct violation of his own proclaimed ceasefires, were the catalyst for the UNSC to finally endorse R2P-based international military action against him.
Gaddafi might have got away with suppressing the present revolution, but for his own arrogance in exposing to the world his cruelty and indifference to his people's rights.
For there is a great fear in the general UN membership, as well as in powerful contrarian states China and Russia, which have their own human rights skeletons in the closet, that the West might use R2P as a cloak for renewed interventions or resources grabs in