On 18 April 2017, for the first time in its history, the UN Security Council (UNSC) held a dedicated meeting on the question of how human rights violations and abuses can lead to the outbreak of mass atrocity crimes and a breakdown in international peace and security. The meeting represented the culmination of a growing push by both the UN Secretariat and specific UN member states to recentre the importance of mass atrocity prevention to the Council’s work and to strengthen its overall focus on human rights. Yet historically, human rights have not been given significant emphasis in the work of the UNSC and, furthermore, the practical links between the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) norm and human rights have remained relatively ambiguous, particularly in terms of how the connection fits into the UNSC’s work on atrocity prevention.

In this context, my open access article in the European Journal of International Security sets out to examine in greater detail how recent attempts to strengthen the link between human rights and atrocity prevention are playing out in the practices of the UNSC, and what this means for the R2P norm’s development as a prevention tool. Informed by textual analysis of 65 UN Security Council meeting records and three case studies, the article shines a light on the relatively underexplored relationship between Chapter VI measures and the R2P, demonstrating how applicatory contestation of the R2P norm is now increasingly connected to the place of human rights within the UNSC’s work and the extent to which such acts are deemed to pose a direct threat to international peace and security. Through this analysis, I highlight two significant and competing ideological frames that are shaping this contestation, one defined by the need to view human rights as a central part of threat identification and prevention and the other defined by the importance of state consent for prevention initiatives and a more restrictive understanding of threat identification.

The connection between human rights and mass atrocity crimes

As former UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, Adama Dieng, argues, ‘experience has shown that be it in Syria, Libya, Iraq, or Yemen, failure to address serious human rights violations often presages more serious acts such as atrocity crimes.’ This is a line of argument that has been central to the creation of new UN initiatives, such as Human Rights up Front (HRuF), which represents a significant attempt to better mainstream human rights and shift the UN’s culture away from reaction and towards a prevention focus across the organisation.

This strategic move to reprioritise prevention initiatives across the UN system has also resulted in a greater emphasis on the R2P as a key tool of atrocity prevention that can work to influence the broader challenge of maintaining international peace and security. Consequently, one of the key challenges UN Secretary-General Guterres positioned before the Security Council in his first opening address back in 2017, was to consider how the tools currently available to the UNSC could be more effectively used to prevent both conflict and atrocity crimes, highlighting the need to make greater use of Chapter VI of the Charter in particular.

However, as my article highlights, while the Council has demonstrated general support and encouragement for greater and fuller use of the Security Council’s prevention toolbox, member states remain fundamentally divided over how the Council locates the early indicators of potential atrocities. Subsequently, one can identify strong pushback against initiatives such as early warning briefings within the Security Council, often directly limiting the possibility for greater collaboration and direct recognition of violations of human rights as precursors to future atrocity crimes.

Two competing ideological frames

The division over the connection between human rights and prevention speaks to two competing frames regarding the R2P’s future application as an atrocity prevention tool and the contested role of human rights within the UNSC. For the Western Permanent Members of the UNC and their allies, the move to draw a stronger connection between incidents of human rights abuses and the work of the Council marks a much-needed expansion that is essential to improving the effectiveness of atrocity prevention and the goals of the R2P norm. In contrast, Russia and China both strongly argue for the need to divorce UNSC prevention initiatives from the mechanisms of human rights protection. Through engaging in applicatory contestation of prevention initiatives, such as those forming part of Chapter VI, China and Russia have been able to reinforce firm parameters around prevention activity and strengthen the current status quo concerning the place of human rights within these discussions. Consequently, this ideological divide between a more long-term economic approach to prevention, and a more liberal approach emphasising the critical link between human rights violations and their potential to lead directly to atrocity crimes, is deepening contestation around norms of human protection while also creating a more combative Council, in which tensions remain high.

These two competing ideological frames ultimately reinforce the sizeable barriers to effective atrocity prevention that have become entrenched through greater contestation over threat identification and the parameters of the Security Council’s remit and purpose. Consequently, as my article argues, the competing interpretations of how Chapter VI should be operationalised throw into doubt claims that the R2P and other human protection norms are currently capable of providing the mobilising force required to implement atrocity prevention strategies. It is clear, for example, that states such as Russia and China are working to both reinforce the original parameters of the R2P norm, as well as limit its overall use as a prevention tool connected to human rights monitoring and enforcement.

The current division in the Council can therefore be seen to directly limit the horizon of opportunity for the R2P’s implementation, both in terms of reacting to atrocity crimes and delivering preventive initiatives. My article thus provides new insight into the connection between human rights and atrocity prevention, as well as how the Council’s structures and practices have overall constrained the effectiveness of the R2P norm. Looking forward, it is argued that the R2P’s implementation as an atrocity prevention tool now appears to be the key battleground in the development of applicatory contestation. The impact of this is likely to lead to graver questions regarding the norm’s overall validity, particularly if the discussion of direct atrocity prevention measures continues to be blocked or limited.

– Dr Samuel Jarvis, York St John University

– Doctor Jarvis’ EJIS article is available open access