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The last two decades have witnessed the highest ever involvement of United Nations’ blue helmets in peacekeeping missions throughout the world. These international missions, as Siobhán Wills observes, consist of different types of peace and enforcement operations, including conflict prevention, peacemaking, peace enforcement, peace building, and humanitarian operations.[1] The engagement of UN troops in civilian protection operations in the world’s war-torn areas has resulted in several complications concerning their mandates to protect civilians from harm on the one hand, and their entanglement in human rights violations on the other.[2]

In light of these developments, a fresh look into the norms of international humanitarian law (IHL) and international human rights law is necessary to remind troops of their obligation to protect civilians from human rights abuses and, at the same time, hold members of these missions accountable for alleged crimes and violations. Thus, the purpose of Protecting Civilians, The Obligations of Peacekeepers is to examine in depth international humanitarian and human rights law instruments and demonstrate how these laws impose obligations on UN peacekeepers and other multinational forces to protect civilians in war-torn areas of the world, including intervention to prevent or stop human rights violations and restore law in UN-occupied areas.

Focusing on the challenges faced by peacekeeping missions in implementing their mandates, the author devotes the first chapter of her book to providing a historical review of peacekeepers’ successes and failures in protecting civilians. She explores how these troops, on different occasions, did less than nothing when civilians were at risk of becoming victims of serious violations, such as the collective blood baths and mass rape campaigns in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, and other ravaged areas of the world. In spite of the fact that UN troops were authorized to take “all appropriate measures”[3] to protect civilians and to use force in case of “self-defence”,[4] these troops repeatedly failed either to implement these mandates or to protect themselves, as when they were attacked in Kigali and lost ten of their members.[5] Moreover, it was reported that the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda and the UN Protection Force abandoned thousands of civilians in the Kigali École Technique Officielle and in Srebrenica to be slaughtered by Hutu and Serb forces, respectively.[6]

Chapter 2 of this analysis examines the extent to which international humanitarian law obliges peacekeeping forces to protect civilians from human rights abuses. Relying on her extensive research, Wills explains that the ambiguity of obligations imposed on UN peacekeeping missions to protect civilians during armed conflict under IHL—particularly common article 1 to the 1949 Geneva Conventions[7]—has resulted in many incompatibilities in peacekeepers’ mandates. This vagueness has encouraged the UN to treat the above laws as mere political perspective rather than as binding law. Finally, the author concludes by claiming that treating the norms of IHL—as they relate to UN troops—as moral standards rather than laws compelling obedience has undermined many peacekeeping missions and caused the failure of these operations in different regions of the world.[8]

By the same token, Wills tries, in chapter 3, to ascertain the applicability of international human rights law to UN peacekeeping missions and to determine whether these laws impose obligations on UN troops and multinational forces to protect civilians during armed conflict. The author relies on different perspectives—particularly that of IHL—to examine the applicability of human rights law to armed conflicts, and then reviews historical developments in IHL and international human rights law since the 1960s. Moreover, in examining different cases, she explores the relationship between international human rights law and other regimes, namely occupation law and IHL. Wills concludes by asserting that, despite the fact that many questions about peacekeepers’ responsibilities in protecting civilian populations remain undetermined, human rights law is still applicable during armed conflict. This notion has been supported by the jurisprudence of the International Court of Justice, regional human rights courts, UN human rights bodies, and the reports of the International Committee of the Red Cross. In this respect, the Human Rights Committee has provided that the UN is bound by international human rights law in territories under its administration and that, accordingly, UN peacekeepers are not immune from its investigation.[9] However, this proclamation does not go so far as to say that UN troops may be held accountable for violations of their human rights obligations in international or national courts, except when they are deployed without a UN Security Council resolution.

Wills insists that, even though the UN is not a party to IHL treaties and consequently cannot be expected to carry out all obligations included in these treaties, it is widely accepted that UN troops must respect the “principles and spirit” of the laws of war.[10] However, this “respect” does not impose any obligation on UN peacekeepers to prevent violations of IHL or require that they be held responsible for their felonies in territories under their control.[11] On that basis, ruling on violations of IHL committed by UN troops in Somalia, both the Canadian court martials and the Belgian military court concluded that IHL did not apply to UN peacekeeping forces in Somalia,[12] decisions that enraged human rights groups and activists.

Nonetheless, the author examines in chapter 4 of her analysis the question of the applicability of occupation laws[13] to the UN forces involved in humanitarian intervention or peacekeeping operations, notwithstanding that the UN is not a state party to these conventions and that its troops are not considered to be belligerent occupation forces. After a considerable analysis of different cases—particularly the status of the United Nations Operation in Somalia, the Kosovo Force, the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo, and the multinational forces in Iraq—Wills concludes that the question of the applicability of the laws of occupation to UN operations is an issue that is open to discussion and controversy.[14] While some commentators argue that Security Council Resolution 1483 made it clear that the laws of occupation may be applicable to operations mandated by the UN, others were reluctant to consider the UN-run operations as comparable to military occupation.[15]

In the light of the outcomes of previous chapters, Wills tries in chapter 5 of this work to determine the scope of the UN peacekeepers’ and other multinational forces’ obligations to protect civilians from serious violations of human rights, including those committed by third parties against local populations.

The author develops the argument that UN peacekeepers and forces alike have both moral and legal obligations to stop violence against civilians, whether as troops mandated by the UN or as subjects of contributing states bound by the norms of international humanitarian law conventions. In this respect, she refers to the concept of the collective “responsibility to protect”,[16] and to common article 1 to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which provides for the duty to “respect and ensure respect for” international humanitarian law.[17] Although these provisions are directed at states or organizations, they nevertheless impose indirect responsibility on individual peacekeepers to protect civilians from violations of their fundamental human rights. Nonetheless, in connection with the above discussion, the author would argue that the duty to protect civilians from violations of human rights can also be derived from the jus cogens and erga omnes legal concepts, which prohibit such violations on the basis of the common interest of the international community.[18]

In fact, the principle of international collective responsibility to protect civilians emerged and was emphasized in the mandates of peacekeeping missions in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide and Srebrenica mass killings, in 1994 and 1995 respectively. Since then, this principle has become a clear norm within the obligations of peacekeepers and multinational forces whether deployed according to a UN Security Council resolution or authorized by regional organizations. In spite of these instructions, some peacekeeping missions have utterly failed to protect civilians, while others have been actively involved in the violation of civilians’ human rights, including sexual exploitation and abuse.[19]

As indicated earlier, peacekeeping and multinational operations have become a focus of legal studies. This is not because they have served as one of the UN’s tools to preserve peace and security around the world since the establishment of the UN Truce Supervision Organization in 1948, but due to their repeated failure to prevent or stop mass violations against civilians, relying on the notion that intervening to stop human rights violations could be understood as supporting one side of the conflict against the other or losing impartiality.[20] Moreover, these missions were criticized for alleged crimes and violations of human rights committed by their members against protected people, specifically sexual exploitation, smuggling through borders, trafficking in women and girls,[21] and sexual scandals, including “sex for food”.[22]

Where there was no peace to keep, and bound by inappropriate mandates, UN troops overwhelmingly failed to prevent the tragic massacre of approximately eight thousand Bosnian Muslims by Serb forces and paramilitaries in Srebrenica, a UN safe haven, in the summer of 1995.[23] Simultaneously, in spite of several alarming reports, the UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda, led by the Canadian General Roméo Dallaire, could not stop the mass killings of eight hundred thousand Tutsi and Hutu civilians, in 1994, due to the reluctance of the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations (UNDPKO) to provide adequate troops to properly carry out the mission’s mandate.[24] This failure caused General Dallaire to ask his famous question: “Are we all human, or are some more human than others?”[25]

These issues raise various questions relating to peacekeepers’ collective obligations to protect civilians under international humanitarian and human rights law, the possibility of holding them accountable for their crimes, and whether the UN peacekeeping missions are bound by the norms of local or international laws of armed conflict. Considering the dramatic changes and complexity in recent peace support operations, the main concern of legal inquiries ought to shift from merely focusing on these missions’ obligations under international law to protect civilians and bring peace and security to areas devastated by war to laying down the foundation of a legal framework to eradicate peacekeepers’ violations and bring perpetrators to justice―not only repatriating them to their contributing states.

Many of the above concerns are meticulously addressed by Siobhán Wills in this timely, critical, and well articulated work—originally submitted to All Souls College, Oxford University, as a doctoral thesis—by carefully analyzing the many inadequacies in the mandate of peacekeeping missions, caused by the lack of international political will and manifested in the tragic failure to stop mass killings and other atrocities in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, Kosovo, Congo, and other regions of the world racked by war.[26]

In sum, this work contributes to the development of a legal literature that will undoubtedly assist the UNDPKO in overcoming previous shortcomings. Moreover, it underlines the necessity to reform the United Nations’ founding laws and procedures, particularly the laws of intervention under chapters 6 and 7 of the UN Charter. At the same time, it emphasizes that the international community must take further steps to end the conspiracy of silence, combat the culture of impunity, and eradicate the UN peacekeepers’ human rights violations, including sexual misconduct and exploitation.[27] This will not be possible without introducing an effective judicial mechanism within the United Nations to bring blue-helmeted perpetrators to justice rather than repatriating them to face prosecution, if any, in their own countries.