Madam Speaker, I am pleased to respond to the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs who has herself graced the House with her own expertise and eloquence.
On the first matter, as to whether we might have been able, had we succeeded in deflecting the opposition of Russia and France, to set up an international criminal tribunal for Iraq, might the logistics not have been daunting? They may have been difficult but I do not believe they would have been more daunting than that which occurred in the matter of setting it up for former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Indeed, I do not know what could have been more daunting than what had to be set up for Rwanda in the aftermath of the horrific and preventable genocide in Rwanda.
I would have hoped that had we set it up for Iraq at the time in the early 1990s, we would have at least deterred the subsequent and continuing criminality of Saddam Hussein and his regime. We would have at least deterred other countries that might have sought to trade and invest in Iraq. We might have given encouragement to the Iraqi people that we take our commitments seriously, not as they were abandoned in the immediate aftermath of the uprising that they were invited to undertake at the end of the first gulf war. The very establishment of the international criminal tribunal for Iraq would have sent a message to the Iraqi people of showing solidarity with them. That might have encouraged them in the kind of impetus for regime change that we abandoned them in with respect to their revolt.
On the matter of the United Nations and the Security Council and the difficulties of reform, I am not unmindful of those difficulties. Therefore I specified certain specific approaches that we could take. I do believe that we need to rethink, in the light of a post-9/11 universe, some of the foundational doctrines of international law on the use of force.
It is not that I share the American approach with respect to the doctrine of the pre-emptive use of force, I have written elsewhere about it, but I do think we have to rethink the notion of the two exceptions to the use of force, namely, the right of self-defence in response to an armed attack and the necessary authorization by the UN Security Council. Each of those two may have to be revisited. I do not think we can any longer say in a post-9/11 universe that a state has to await an armed attack, because that will in fact convert the United Nations charter into a suicide pact. We need to decide what the nature is of the degree of imminence and clear and present danger that is necessary for purposes of authorizing the use of the right of self-defence.
Similarly, we have to rethink the notion of a UN Security Council authorization. Let me give one example. In the Kosovo principle and precedent it had been mentioned earlier that the resolution was vetoed or not passed, but it was deemed to have legitimacy because the preponderance of members of the Security Council did in fact support it. It did not pass only because of the Russian veto, so we may have to rethink our notions of legitimacy.
We certainly have to re-address norms of international humanitarian law because we are now in the age of super technology in the matter of the exercise of warfare, but the collateral damage that is thought to be prevented still occurs and can still be serious and sustained. We have to address notions of international humanitarian law, how we can give expression and protection to the cardinal principle of the protection of civilian immunity, the prohibition on the indiscriminate use of force and the prohibition on the targeting of mixed civilian-military targets where we cannot distinguished between them and the like.
Finally, on the matter of the UN commission on human rights, I think we can establish criteria that will be such that it will not give exculpatory immunity to the violators but will protect those democracies that are singled out for differential and discriminatory treatment.