Archives » Tuesday, January 13, 2009
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Katie Paul
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Jan 13, 2009 05:19 PM
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe may be the only person left who denies that his country is spiraling out of control, but that hasn’t made it any easier to stop. Tuesday, the U.N. reported that more than 2,000 people have perished in the cholera epidemic sweeping the country since August. Some 40,000 are infected, and the number of cases continues to rise exponentially. Worst of all, the complete collapse of the country’s basic infrastructure—water, sanitation, health care—has given rise to other diseases, including a particularly terrifying drug-resistant form of tuberculosis, which could easily turn an epidemic into a pandemic. Through it all, Mugabe has squandered aid money, chased out humanitarian groups, and suppressed information about the crisis.
That’s why U.S.-based group Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) upped the ante Tuesday, accusing Mugabe and his government of ‘crimes against humanity’ after collecting damning evidence on a fact-finding mission in December. They want the U.N. Security Council to see the health crisis as threat to international peace and security, then swoop in and take over the health care system (with or without Mugabe’s blessing), and then refer the matter to the International Criminal Court for investigation. Fortunately for them, they have folks with serious street credit behind them—including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former U.N. Chief Prosecutor Richard Goldstone, and former Irish President and UNHCR High Commissioner Mary Robinson.
The argument boils down to this: systematically denying people access to basic health care is not terribly different than holding guns to their heads. If so, they say, why not call upon the same international laws that are normally applied in conflict settings? The United Nations is then obliged to respond comparably in both scenarios—which means invoking its members’ ‘responsibility to protect’ and mobilizing an intervention akin to those dispatched to the war zones of Kosovo, Rwanda, Somalia, the former Yugoslavia, and Darfur. If the argument works, it would expand the paradigm for invoking international human rights law. Why? See Exhibit A: the definition of ‘crimes against humanity’ in the Rome Treaty, which established the ICC back in 1998. The key clauses are highlighted here:
Article 7: Crimes against humanity
For the purpose of this Statute, "crime against humanity" means anyof the following acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack:
(a) Murder;
(b) Extermination;
(c) Enslavement;
(d) Deportation or forcible transfer of population;
(e) Imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law;
(f) Torture;
(g) Rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity;
(h) Persecution against any identifiable group or collectivity on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious,gender as defined in paragraph 3, or other grounds that are universally recognized as impermissible under international law, in connection with any act referred to in this paragraph or any crime within the jurisdiction of the Court;
(i) Enforced disappearance of persons;
(j) The crime of apartheid;
(k) Other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.
What they would need to do to get the idea to work is to show that the actions—or lack thereof—that precipitated the health crises constitute an attack against the civilian population in and around Zimbabwe. In the chambers of the United Nations, that could be a tough sell. The only other time the Security Council has approached a health crisis as a threat to international peace and security was back in 2000, when it issued a relatively mild statement of concern about the global AIDS epidemic. But signing off on a document filled with words like ‘requests,’‘encourages,’ and ‘interested Member States’ is a far cry from giving the United Nations the green light to take over a recalcitrant sovereign country’s health care system and put its leaders on trial.
Politically speaking, this is already an uphill battle. Naturally, Zimbabwe’s government is less than pleased, dismissing the group in characteristic anti-imperialist terms as a‘stupid, Western created organization.’ And the chances for success in leveling ICC charges against Mugabe and his thugs have more to do with politics in New York than in Harare. But even there, the PHR is up against the same familiar United Nations stalemate. An indignant China has long covered Mugabe’s back, despite years of damning evidence against him. What’s more, the Security Council now has to contend with Uganda, which just taken its place as a rotating member and has pledged to back only the Southern African Development Community’s impotent ongoing negotiations.
But before you write off the PHR plan as hopeless idealism, consider this: though novel, their interpretation of international law is pure strategy. "The idea of ‘health’ is less politically charged," said Mary Robinson at a press gathering on Tuesday. "There are a lot of crises right now," she added, pointing to Congo, Darfur, and Gaza, among others. "The health prism is the way to get it into the Security Council and to get them to act on it." No one has been able to take Mugabe down over shoddy elections, tortured journalists, or land seizures, even though those are also violations of international law, but framing his crimes in terms of health could potentially shame the Security Council’s stragglers into supporting the measures. After all, it’s tough for political figures to justify blocking medical care to innocents.
What do you international law gurus out there think? Without getting tangled in a debate about the merits and demerits of the "responsibility to protect," chew on this in the comments: a) does the argument hold water, and b) will the strategy work?
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