across syria and with so many foreign russians involved it's clear that the crisis thresh is far beyond these borders refinish nasty brute force in from syria. let's have permeable more news for you on our website our. culture is that so much different there's a huge musician if you try to escape if left to right to protect the rights to penetrate as syria continues down the path of destruction and civil war there are loud voices on the international. limitations free liquid intake should free the store charges free. range and free the street the studio three a limo and free broadcast live video for your media projects

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below him welcoming cross-talk i feel about the right to protect the rights to penetrate as syria continues down the path of destruction and civil war there are a loud voices on the international stage demanding some form of outside intervention to end the violence and death is international law moving from sovereignty is right to sovereignty as responsibility lifts the sled to cross talk of possible intervention into syria i'm joined by philip khan lived in london he is a lecturer in international conflict at the university of kent a member of the international studies association and the brit. international studies association also in london we have eight in here he is director of the security and international relations program at the university of westminster and in geneva we cross to stephen hynes he is an international lawyer and a professor at the geneva center for security policy all right gentlemen crossed

rules in effect that means you can jump any time you want a defined or you are to key right to protect your right to penetrate nation states what is that because we saw in libya and we have syria on the agenda ok and i think we all would agree that syria and libya are not great powers. is usually used to refer to the responsibility to protect the right to protect possibly the right to protect is a better way of understanding this principle because. what or essentially stands for is a discretionary entitlement the security council may intervene if the term and sort of critical situation constitutes a threat to international peace and security but the problem with our two three is that it's under no obligation to do anything and essentially what ought to be has done is very very little it's created a slogan and certainly it's entered into political discourse and many people refer to it in academia and international politics but it has changed absolutely nothing

when it comes to international relations and particularly the international community's response to intrastate crises and the situation in syria i think is very obvious evidence to back that up it's a classic case of the great powers choosing when and where to intervene and the humanitarian situation on the ground you know plays very little role in that terminations you know i thought i was trying to get there with my first question i mean strong nations have sovereignty will under this doctrine weak nations are made to be made responsible it seems to me that if there's not there's a double standard in play right here if you're not a strong country then other people can tell you how to behave. now i'm going to i'm going to want to say was i don't want go ahead oh yeah yeah i mean i think that's right and i would my would go further i think that the responsibility the idea of sovereignty just once ability does not only mean that effectively we countries have less the brindisi but also that say it undermines democracy and accountability

within all countries themselves because the idea of the responsibility to protect i think means that states are effectively responsible for their people rather than responsible to their people and that's the distinction which the responsibility to protect introduces so those states and are seen to be responsible to the international community rather than accountable to their own people and to meet the interests of their own people and so for that reason i think. the idea that the responsibility to protect can offer anything to the people of syria or that it stands in support of an idea of accountable or popular representative or democratic syrian government is totally ridiculous ok stephen we have to dissenting voices here how do you come out on this here because there are so many examples out there what about brainwave why why can't to an outside country and say you know you've been invaded by your neighbor here you have an opaque government why don't we have a humanitarian intervention to save the people of bahrain what about gaza why can't

we have a countries go in there and protect gazans when israel attacks them i mean it seems to be full of double standards go ahead. well there are double standards here in a sense if you look at them out why we can't just go back into syria of responsibility versus rights where there's no i as an international lawyer i look at the way that this particular so-called norm has developed over the last thirteen years or so and it was really kicked off by a commission that met after the nato intervention over kosovo in one nine hundred ninety nine what was interesting about that was of course that intervention was conducted without a u.n. security council mandate. and the way that international law works and that's. specters that the u.n. security council is in effect the authority under un law that can grant approval give a mandate to a state or a group of states to intervene in the way that we're discussing up until kosovo up

until the responsibility to protect report there was no doubt that this was based on the idea of sovereign states having the right to intervene if they felt it was necessary or appropriate i think what are to pay as it's evolved since nine hundred ninety nine and certainly the two thousand and one commission process the way that it sort of aldous that the jurisprudential underpinnings now of the u.n. security council reaching a deliberate reaching a mandate to intervene has shifted from the basic understanding that a collection of states have a right to do something to the idea that states are actually in the position of having some measure of responsibility to do something so i don't think one can dismiss it. i mean whatever if i got a nanny i thought i still feel i'm very suspicious of this because i see geopolitical politics behind it i mean united states invaded iraq without any kind of u.n. mandate ok it and it's about it it was applying sponsibility to protect in some

form or another but it's just the picking you know it's the west picking on people it doesn't like ok and if they're using these great words of responsibility protecting civilians i mean it's easier to swallow maybe for western audiences when you think. well in principle i don't have a problem with the idea of states having responsibility to protect their own citizens and nor do i have a problem with the idea of the international community having the responsibility to intervene if necessary to protect citizens who are suffering agree just human rights violations under committed by other states that to me seems a perfectly logical premise however my problem with responsibly protect isn't that it fundamentally disrupts the relationship between states and the citizens are facilitates great power intervention we've always had great power interventions long before our to be the problem i have what it is that in situations like this in syria and in other situations since or two people launched in two thousand and one we've had a catalogue of interesting crises where that has been no international reaction of

any kind precisely because it does not change anything in international law or international politics it simply reaffirms the existing privileges that the p five have and so long as the international community's response to international crises is predicated on the national interests of the p five then we would have the erratic record of intervention that we had prior to or to be when in the one thousand nine hundred sixty really council significantly expanded its understanding of its chapter seven powers and that's the problem but are simply it's not that it has created a new school printer vention a previously didn't exist a great power was always abused humanitarian claims in the past directly and in the nineteenth century that's nothing new the problem is the selective implementation of r.t. in the fact that for all the noise that it has generated in the last ten years it has achieved very very little but you think about that philip i mean it's a pretty spotty record i mean if you still if you look at what happened in libya it's when nato started bombing when they graduate started to decline dramatically i mean again i mean this is the law of unintended consequences i mean it was nato

went in there are under the guise of. the mandate to start death and destruction but it actually accelerated it and it wasn't given a mandate to change the regime which it did in and it'll go again this kind of mission creep with syria under the r.g.p. we're going to try to get rid of a start using nice words. i agree i mean and i disagree with aiden in terms of the idea that the responsibility to protect has said no effect or is insignificant or doesn't change anything politically legally i think it does and it does so for the worse if you take for it i mean while it's true that great powers have always been able to have their own way i don't see in the past they don't see that that's an argument for abolishing whatever legal barriers stand in their way to make intervention easier and having those legal barriers and political barriers in place is one way of making it easier to hold power to account rather than

allowing for the less restrained an unaccountable exercise of power by the permanent five members of the security council or by any other large major military power so i do think the responsibility to protect and along the lines that you said in relation to what happened in libya were a mandate for civilian protection gave enormous scope for the nato powers to effectively mount a campaign of regime change and i should also add to mean a very similar thing happened at the same time in ivory coast in cote d'ivoire where a mandate a u.n. mandate for civilian protection effectively allowed un peacekeepers who were stationed there to overthrow an incumbent to overthrow the incumbent government so it's a much it's a much wider field of what's actually happening and i do think it has significant and important consequences i mean in the past perhaps while great powers could still intervene in the affairs of smaller states they had to disguise the way in which they did by pretending to support client regimes or claiming that they were intervening because they'd been invited in or supporting rebels covertly whatever

it was there was always some they had to pay homage to the principle that intervention was seen to be a negative thing and that it was seen to be dictatorial interference in the affairs of other states now the responsibility to protect with the rise of the responsibility to protect own ideas of humanitarian intervention it makes it much easier. for intervention to take place and for it to be seen as legitimate rather than something that's images in it and corrosive of international order it's very interesting theme it sounds like to me to same song but it's a do it's the same song with a different dance that's that's what philip saying i want to. thank you for asking me to do so because i i actually don't believe that the evidence so far suggests that this is giving great powers a. car blown approval to intervene this is simply nonsense the idea that iraq was conducted the invasion of iraq was conducted on the responsibility to protect is just perverse it wasn't that was that was not the

argument put forward by you know you know what it was a cake walk you know they were going to really assess the raiders i mean come on they did it was the only store people after a decade of sanctions needed to be liberated and were democracy very very serious middle east and really that was tiring i am well i am look i am looking i am looking at the international lore of this and i'm telling you in fact likely that our to pay was never part of either the british or american justification for the invasion of iraq now as it happens i opposed that in from that intervention i thought that it was unlawful and strategically unnecessary but i'm afraid that it's wrong to suggest that if i can intervene if i can i don't know if you gentlemen we're going to go to a short break and after the actual break we'll continue our discussion on the contradictory situation in syria today r.t. . if you.

want to. well the. science technology innovation of all the is developments around russia we've got the future of coverage.

good. luck. more news today harlem says once again flatow for these are the images go viral and seeing from the streets of canada. shanghai for asians are also day. in the still. listening to the. live. welcome back across time to mind you were talking about syria and outside military intervention live.

slim ok phil before i go into the break you want to jump in there respond to something that stephen said in geneva go right ahead. yeah i don't i mean it might not have been in the black letter of the security council debates or in the legal justifications given thaw the anglo american invasion of iraq but the idea that humanitarian intervention the responsibility to take had no role to play in iraq i think is deeply disingenuous and it systematically lowered the barriers there political barriers to man interventions of that kind and both george bush and tony blair repeatedly invoked the idea of overthrowing saddam's tyranny a very strong humanitarian argument that has been made in many other cases when military intervention has been launched in internal those men y. z. very made very clearly makes the case that he saw the intervention in iraq along the lines of the responsibility to present so i'm not sure that the streaks of

legal criteria in relation to what happened in iraq are as important as the political question and the fact that it was politically legitimated on the grounds on largely humanitarian grounds as well as the invisible never diff never found weapons of mass destruction ok even you would be all right stephen you want to reply and then i'll go to yeah no i i'm coming back to the us ok we've got a pin this one where we got up in this one right there on the legal justification from both united states and united kingdom had nothing whatever to do with our two it related in particular in the british case it related to a supposed security council mandate dating back to ninety ninety and the the idea that our troops he had anything to do with our troops with iraq is i think completely false i'm not saying that they there were certain post conflict post invasion justifications based on humanitarian arguments there certainly were but

they had nothing to do with the legal justification and we're going to come back to this whole business of where the no no i just want to finish on this because i think it's quite important to make the point but nothing in the arts to pay evolvement process from the international. missions report in two thousand and one truly high level panel report that was subsequently commissioned by kofi annan through kofi annan reports to the world summit in two thousand and five nothing in there recommended anything other than the decision to intervene in these circumstances militarily should rest with the security council within the united nations and so in some senses i would argue that our superior he has in some ways strengthened the role of the security council and made it less likely although you may be a maybe a traitor it's created a lot more paralysis even if i can go to you because russia and china is good to get here and given a lot of criticism in the world for its vetoing of any more intervention into syria

and the russians and the chinese will go back and say look what you did in libya you abused that mandate because of this new doctrine in the russians and the chinese are going to not budge on this one or if there is it'll be much more nuance now what i'm getting at is it our destruction is finding itself dead in the water because it was abused in libya. i don't think so i mean russia and china's position on this the resolution that was put to the security council that russia and china vetoed made no mention of military intervention it's very important regime change is mentioned in there and in the need to change the political order on the ground so it's under the same we understand and slaughters its own people like that and is an elected and has ruled for forty years and i don't think it's unreasonable to discuss regime change with the people on the ground in syria i mean we have always and we have to continue to have some understanding of the situation on the ground in syria and the suffering of people. during their in a situation like this where is the government totally unaware that government

engages in this kind of atrocity against its own people of course they begin to look a little bit maybe you know again clearly you don't like this doctor and so what would you suggest doing ok. i don't like or two people so i said because of what stephen said it has strengthened the security council and we have the shariah every now and again in new york were members fall into a room we all know are going to vote and nothing really is resolved or to pay has as stephen said strengthen the security council the power of the security council is precisely the problem in these situations we've always had great power interventions with or without security council approval philips idea of sovereignty is being inviolability is totally out of date and has been for at least twenty years the notion that states consider themselves to be beyond any external interference i mean we had the genocide convention in one thousand forty five myriad international treaties since then recognizing some role for the international community in interesting affairs and that starts a rule i welcome a problem as i say it's really hard to see with what i've been saying. i disagree

with this oh disagree with this idea of the sovereign impunity is purely there to protect governments so that they can slaughter their own people and have no international accountability the idea of noninterference isn't about protecting genocidal governments the idea of not interference in so in the affairs of other states is to protect the idea of representative government so that the role of the people in determining their i was a syrian on how the center for government should behave is the point so i think regime change isn't just addressed by francisco as you know as a judge or a female representative by external powers jumping through is really just a new kind of question is preserving if the question is preserving the rights and that's a question i asked you a couple of times and i was going to say so this is actually a syrian people there and you're seeing here is a lottery generating thriller film i'd like you to reply go right ahead. you know

how representative is the assad government how can the people in syria exercise this idea this right of self-determination that's precisely what they're attempting to do it seems their government is slaughtering them now what we do in that context sovereignty has unfortunately is the dark side of sovereignty as provided with the means to to engage in these kind of activities and for us to say well it's sovereign inviolability it probably enables independence and something from a nation of course in most situations it does but in this situation there has to be limits it would be ridiculous to claim otherwise and it's also a position that's totally out of step with international political understanding of sovereignty and international legal understanding something it's a totally outdated seventeenth century notion of sovereignty all right gentlemen i should like you i was even i like to go to steve in the go ahead stephen you want to jump in there go ahead yes they are i think one of the biggest problems and i'm sure that your viewers will be confused by this but one of the one of the biggest problems of course you've got if you've got legal issues on one side and political

issues on the other and these two these two different dimensions to the problem do tend to conflict with one another i mean i i have some sympathy with what are you saying about the desirability of being able to do something and his frustration with the security council having apparently been strengthened which is which is my tentative view at the moment but i are too picky the trouble is with this is that back in one nine hundred forty five when the charter was drafted there had to be a realistic assessment of the importance the sheer importance of great powers the five that were originally put there are still were there the importance of ensuring that nothing would create such catastrophe with an interest not international system of the great powers would end up in conflict again this is the dial limited particularly those with her international lawyers with some sympathy with the notion of human security and intervention in the. stances have to confront we

cannot intervene in every certain circumstances because to do so would be political risk let me look at give me an example filled if i can go to you ok let's say iran is watching what's going on in syria and it invokes r two p. and does an intervention ok i mean if the west does it it's ok because they're western powers they're good guys but if iran does something like that using the same doctrine it will be called invasion. can do that if i may john kerry going to do so using old obsolete right. no i think i mean i think it's really going if you take the example of the russian intervention in georgia which was defended initially at least on humanitarian grounds it was roundly sneered at by western states and by western commentators the idea that the russians would dare to invoke a humanitarian justification there when clearly the only states and china are expected to be allowed to you know polis the discourse of human terrorism or western powers so i think it's very. there's talk of universalism in this talk as

if these rights are three floating and belong to anybody in principle but in reality we know that it's going to be the great powers they decide how they are applied the great powers on the security council in particular the western powers western powers can i can i come back here because you said what about if iran wanted to invoke this are to play well equipped of course you can try taking the issue to the security council which is the body that is in a position to make those if you think of the region as we can only traction will get any traction what you just be sneered out right well it probably would be this i was alluding to it at the site but in the same sense do acknowledge that the very fact that there appears to be a problem at the moment is caused by both the russians and the chinese indicating that they will veto so you can have it both ways you can say that this is a this is a means for the west to intervene all the time when clearly in the case of syria both russia and china are making it very clear

a moment but i have no truck with nato or anybody else for that matter intervening in syria there are checks here and the tracks we have to accept that they are uncomfortable tracks they do produce these sorts of guy limits but they are clearly tracks and they exist not only for iran but also for the western powers as well what is the future of our tepee where is this doctrine going to go because it seems like it was really cheered on for libya and now i now i notice western media doesn't like to cover libya too much because it's just. one big mess ok with militias running around in what not ok but it's still a victory for nato and it's justified true this doctor here i mean where does that we go from here because it doesn't look like it's going to work with with syria and unfortunately given the limited reports we have coming out of syria the situation on the ground there is quite dire. well i mean the responsibility protect is as i've said elsewhere a slogan and it's a very good slogan it's a very catchy slogan and like a lot of slogans like that i'm sure it will have

a future in you know the chattering goes on amongst politicians at the security council but in actual practice it will have very little practical influence and as you said a lot of people in two thousand and eleven welcomed the intervention in libya as being all champion action it's important to remember that in the security council resolution sanctioning action in libya there's no mention of the international community's responsibility to protect the bases for action was chapter seven the responsibility for type is mentioned once all in the context of gadhafi has responsibility to protect its own people has no sense that this was the international community recognizing its collective responsibility to act on behalf of the libyan people there and you know we have interrupt your fascinating conversation many thanks to my guest today in london and in geneva and make sure viewers for watching us to see you next time and remember. it.

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