There's a substantial gap between the commitments of the international community and their implementation and practice. I previously published a book, The Responsibility to Protect, on the obligation of all states to prevent mass atrocity crimes, so I didn't choose those four sets of crimes that I mentioned in my proposed language by accident. These are the four sets of crimes captured in the “responsibility to protect” adopted unanimously by the UN World Summit in 2005.
I'm actually in the process right now of finishing a law review article that will be the first assessment of the way in which the Security Council has embraced the concept of the responsibility to protect and has engaged on it.
Interestingly, since the adoption of the responsibility to protect in 2005, and a lot of concern that countries went along, like China or Russia or others, despite their lack of interest in these kinds of concepts.... What my review has found, looking at the council's engagement in the last 11 years, is that there have been well over 150 to some 200 mentions of the responsibility to protect or the failure to protect in Security Council resolutions and presidential statements. In fact, it's become very much a norm that has been embraced by the Security Council as a major motivator of action, plus, of course, in the most substantial of ways in which the council can engage under its chapter 7 authority, which would include potentially economic sanctions or even the use of force.
Obviously, the endemic realities of the UN charter, going back to the founding of the United Nations and the P5 veto, has thwarted action in those areas on the most complex and divisive of political disputes among the P5. We've seen that the council previously was able to engage on Libya, for example, where specific sanctions were put in place by consensus within the council, or by a lack of no votes against such actions. On Syria, there's been an inability to obtain a consensus.
I think my overall point is that just because the council is not capable of reaching a consensus, in my view that shouldn't be Canada's measure. Again, I'm an outsider, so you'll forgive me for just looking at the subject of the hearing you're having, which was what I think about these laws based on my read of them.
With that very humble caveat, I would say that Canada shouldn't launch to tie itself to imposing economic sanctions to only situations in which the council can reach a consensus, or where there's this very strong language—dramatically higher than I think the council would require—that relates to imminent threats and major international crises, which may not actually encompass a mass atrocity situation, which would be primarily internal by orientation.