Expelling rogue states from the UN is a bad idea, but it has popped up again today in Nick Cohen’s piece in the Guardian with respect to Sudan.He stopped just short of calling for the expulsion of Sudan because of the genocide in Darfur, but the line of argument is clear – he feels it is not right that the ambassadors of states like the Sudan ” remain honoured figures at the UN headquarters in Manhattan.”. That block votes elected Libya, Zimbabwe and Sudan to the Human Rights Council in 2004 is clearly wrong, but if the UN sent the ambassador or every state that commits crimes against humanity packing, there would soon be many empty seats in the General Assembly.
Apart from the historical precedent of the failure of the League of Nations, a failure due in large part to the withdrawal of states who came into conflict with the League’s ideals, there is also the issue that the current government in a genocidal state is not the state, and might not be the government next week. The UN is an organisation of member states, not of governments; the current government in Khartoum may not be the government next year, and it is the state, not the government, that the ambassador represents.
We take this distinction for granted in the West – the head of the Irish Permanent Mission at the UN isn’t Bertie Ahern’s personal representative, and next year, if the government changes, he won’t be replaced by one of Enda Kenny’s buddies. Diplomacy is all about keeping open channels of communication with people whom you might rather knife in the back, in the belief that jaw-jaw is better than war-war. This is a behavioural norm which we need to encourage in the world, not diminish.
There are 192 members in the UN this year, and many of them do not measure up to the ideals of the Charter or the Declaration of Human Rights. The idea that you might expel the delinquents seems attractive at first, but there is a majority in the General Assembly who don’t like the US, and if you have a UN without Sudan, Zimbabwe, North Korea and the US, you might as well shut up shop.
In school, we don’t expel the slow learners because they are stupid, we provide resources to remediate their learning difficulties. In global governance, the UN is an important channel for diffusing certain norms of behaviour, and if some states are slow to grasp them, we need to work with them to show them how it their current policies are not in their own best interests in the long term. It is true, as Cohen argues, that no one has been brought to justice for the genocide in Darfur, but the idea in international law that people can be hauled off to the Hague and tried for crimes against humanity is still a very young one in historical terms. Identifying the guilty individuals, assembling evidence to secure a conviction beyond reasonable doubt and conducting a case before the International Criminal Court takes time, and one of the reasons is because that body operates to standards of proof higher than the drumhead court martial of the Sunday Op-Ed piece.
It would be nice if the UN had the resources to send in enough firepower to arrest the current government in Khartoum, but it hasn’t, and it hasn’t because the other 191 states won’t provide the resources, and are not yet willing to concede that much of their sovereignty to the idea of the UN as world government. This is particularly true of the G8 nations, who are happy to use the UN when it suits them, but who are still shy of biting the bullet on the idea of the absolute rule of international humanitarian law on issues like genocide.
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