Resistance to the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) norm is often attributed to its association with military intervention and regime change. Political friction and contestation showcased at the recent United Nations General Assembly annual R2P debate point to broader problems for atrocity prevention at the UN.

On 26 and 30 June, the United Nations General Assembly held a general debate on the responsibility to protect (R2P) and the prevention of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. This marked the 14th General Assembly annual meeting on R2P, held every year since 2009 (with the exception of 2020 due to COVID-19). Following reports in recent years that focused on children and young people, women, early warning, and prevention, the theme of the UN Secretary-General’s 2023 annual report on R2P centred on the interrelationship between development and mass atrocity crimes.

The key message of the 2023 report is familiar. It reiterates the General Assembly’s endorsement of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development that “there can be no sustainable development without peace and no peace without sustainable development,” albeit injecting an atrocity prevention lens. Armed conflict is among the highest risk factors of mass atrocities and is one of the greatest inhibitors to economic development. While not all armed conflicts or atrocities occur in conditions of poverty and underdevelopment, societies that achieve sustained and equitable economic development are significantly more likely to experience sustainable peace and are more resilient to mass atrocities.

The report’s recommendations are mostly aimed at leveraging and fine-tuning existing commitments. For example, the report recalls the SDG 16 commitment to promote peaceful and inclusive societies. Targets for achieving this goal include, inter alia: building effective, accountable, and inclusive institutions; reducing all forms of violence everywhere; protecting children from abuse and violence; promoting the rule of law and equal access to justice; reducing the flow of illicit arms; and combatting corruption. These also help reduce the risk of atrocity crimes, particularly if they complement other measures to end identity-based discrimination and strengthen social resilience linked to poverty, inequality, food security, health, and education.

To this end, the report encourages states to build capacities to detect and respond to atrocity risks that are “embedded in social and economic patterns of deprivation or exclusion.” It urges international development stakeholders to sensitize development programming to risks and drivers of mass atrocities to (at minimum) ensure that they “do no harm” to exacerbate risks and to (more desirably) proactively address risks. It also calls for continued discussion on the role of development in preventing mass atrocities, as the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) did in its first special meeting on socio-economic drivers and inhibitors of atrocity crimes in January of this year.

The recommendations are not especially new or ambitious. This did not stop the report from provoking controversy in the General Assembly. While the overwhelming majority of states affirmed their commitment to the 2005 World Summit endorsement of R2P, there was notable contestation and friction. Venezuela issued a statement on behalf of the Group of Friends in Defence of the Charter of the United Nations that voiced “serious concerns” at “attempts to advance non-consensual and controversial notions” such as R2P. Somewhat perplexingly, given the focus of the report being debated, the statement noted that if the “true intention” of R2P is to protect populations, the starting point should be “promoting solidarity to fight against poverty, hunger and inequality” and “addressing the root causes of conflicts.”

Russia went further, arguing that the Secretary-General’s 2023 report represented an attempt to “whitewash” the R2P principle by “tying it to subjects popular at the United Nations” such as development or, as was the case for the 2022 UNSG report on R2P, protecting children. The US denounced atrocities in China, while China used its right of reply to call attention to the “systematic slaughter and plunder” of Native Americans and US “so-called anti-terrorist military operations” that “caused over 900,000 deaths.” “What is genocide?,” the Chinese representative averred, “The United States knows it best.”

Pakistan characterised R2P as a “noble humanitarian doctrine” that unfortunately in practice serves as a tool of geopolitical interests and double standards—proof of the latter point being that R2P was not invoked for India’s “routine persecution” of Muslims and “war crimes committed by India’s officials in Jammu and Kashmir.” India volleyed back that Pakistan is a state that has actually committed genocide and that people in Pakistan “live in fear” under its blasphemy law and “bigoted policies.”

It is little surprise that acrimonious relations outside the General Assembly carry into its chambers, or that the states who are most critical of R2P are also those with some of the poorest human rights records or stand accused of perpetrating atrocity crimes (the Group of Friends of the UN Charter includes Russia, China, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, Mali, and Zimbabwe). Yet, the tenor of the R2P debate also points to broader problems for human rights protection at the UN, of which opposition to R2P is symptomatic rather than causal.

Russia may be right that the UN Secretary-General’s strategy to bolster support for R2P entails demonstrating how it relates to and supports seemingly less politically controversial agendas. It is disingenuous, however, to suggest that it is R2P and its association with military intervention and regime change that is the problem. The resistance runs deeper than Chapter VII measures. China and Russia have stymied most efforts to mainstream atrocity prevention at the UN and to link the UN’s three pillars of security, development, and human rights. In 2018, China led efforts to cut funding for the office of the Secretary-General to engage in early warning and upstream prevention under Human Rights Up Front, an initiative launched by former Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in December 2013 to address the systemic failure of the UN to confront atrocities in Sri Lanka in 2009.

Both Russia and China resist briefings from human rights experts in the Security Council, arguing that they are best dealt with by other organs of the UN. Yet they also oppose human rights action under the human rights mandate—objecting to efforts of the Human Rights Council to authorise fact-finding missions, use the Universal Periodic Review process and Special Procedure mandates to monitor and address atrocity risks, or issue statements condemning grave abuses.

Russia and China and a flank of like-minded states seek to delink atrocity prevention—which relies on detecting and responding to emerging patterns of human rights violations—from human rights. Much as they resisted SDG 16 for linking “political and governance” concepts like peace with economic goals of development, they push back against efforts to connect atrocity prevention and development in favour of a narrow statist vision of development that reinforces rather than scrutinises state authority. This is not an “R2P problem,” but is rooted in broader efforts by Russia and, even more acutely, China to chip away at international oversight and accountability in the field of human rights. And as the sometimes rancorous recent General Assembly debate exhibited, bitter relationships and dismal human rights records of major powers makes even modest recommendations to leverage development to prevent mass atrocities a fraught political battleground.

Dr Sarah Teitt is an Australian Research Council DECRA Senior Research Fellow and Deputy Director of the Asia Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect in the School of Political Science and International Studies at The University of Queensland.

This article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.