Bob Rae

May 4, 2023

If there were ever a “slow” time in the United Nations calendar, there isn’t one anymore. The expanding role of UN committees, engagement with civil society and the increased weight of the “global polycrisis” all mean that this is a 24/7, twelve-month-a-year operation. This is by no means a complaint. Nor is it the case that all debates are deeply constructive or even worthwhile. As an ambassador, it just means finding a way to catch one’s breath and find moments of reflection and perspective. If the system doesn’t generate these spaces, it is important to just shut the door and start thinking.

Five years ago, when I wrote my report on the Rohingya crisis, “Tell Them We’re Human”, I set out some key objectives for the government of Canada. First, deal with the full impact of the humanitarian crisis itself. Face the tragedy head-on, and never lose sight of the humanity of those affected. Second, take the steps necessary to deal with the underlying political causes of the forcible deportation of nearly a million people. Third, hold those responsible for abuses of fundamental human rights accountable in the courts of law that have been created and expanded over several decades. Finally, keep managing both Canadian and international responses so that they are coordinated. Break through the silos that bureaucracies always create, and insist they work better. 

The same spirit and approach have infused everything I have done since writing that report, and its lessons have stuck with me. What the world is facing today is a level of challenge such as we have never seen outside the world wars. Yet, instead of giving in or indulging ourselves with flame-throwing rhetoric, this is precisely the time when we need to bring to bear both our vision and our sense of pragmatism. There is sufficient wealth in the world to ensure food, shelter, work and purpose for all. It can be done. But doing it will require a mobilization of resources that is unprecedented. To do it, we have to convince governments — and the people they serve — that it is in our collective interest to do it. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has often said that “solidarity is necessity”. That is a phrase we should memorize and repeat, and put into practice.

First priority: the Sustainable Development Goals. When he was making the case for completing the New Deal in the face of a global crisis, Franklin Delano Roosevelt set out his “Four Freedoms”: Freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from fear, and freedom from want. The thinking behind this speech found its way into the Atlantic Charter that he and Winston Churchill signed in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, in 1941, and then into the Charter of the United Nations. The idea that social and economic goals are extraneous to the Charter is completely unfounded: the Charter created an Economic and Social Council (known as ECOSOC) and gave it work to do. This work became even more vital as dozens of countries became independent and sovereign, and as key agencies such as the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) took on greater responsibility for the social and economic health of the world. 

The latest chapter in these efforts was the adoption of 17 Sustainable Development Goals by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015. These goals, which apply to each and every country in the world, are really just the foundation for any decent life: clean air, water, and food; rule of law and protection of the security of the person (remember “freedom from fear”). 

That theme of borderless solidarity was also reflected in one landmark postwar initiative when empathy, common purpose, and a longer view of self-interest drove public policy beyond the nation state: that was the vision of what became known as the Marshall Plan, when the United States decided to invest in European recovery as the impact of the Cold War in Europe became clearer. The Plan was a striking contrast to the beggar-thy-neighbour policies that drove the world into the dark valley of the Great Depression and authoritarianism after the First World War. It meant that America’s boom lifted the global economy in a way that was quite unprecedented. 

The Nuremberg Trials worked because the victorious powers after World War II were prepared to use principles of international justice to make a point about accountability.

The challenge now is even greater, since the pandemic and the Russian attack on Ukraine have driven the global economy to a more dangerous point than we have seen since 1945. More refugees, more homelessness, greater unemployment, greater debt, more conflict. Can we rediscover a vision for recovery that extends beyond national borders and boundaries? 

There was a time when the world’s economic problems could be settled over quiet conversations at the G7 and the IMF. That time has come and gone. Newly industrialized countries, led by China, are now much bigger players, and understandably are not happy with the chummy exclusiveness of the Paris Club. They want in.

Russia’s brazen attack on Crimea in 2014 met with only a tepid response from the West and the UN, as did the destructive civil war in Syria with its accompanying use of both torture and chemical weapons as methods of attack by President Assad on his own people. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 was the moment when isolationism returned once more to the table. It was followed by Brexit, without question the biggest “own goal” in the history of modern public policy. 

After the collapse of the Berlin Wall there was a dangerous assumption that the worst of totalitarianism was behind us and that the spread of multilateral enlightenment would produce an inevitably benign result.  Defence budgets were cut, new institutions and mechanisms were struck, such as the International Criminal Court (ICC), the UN’s Responsibility to Protect principle and Peacebuilding Commission. The French philosopher Blaise Pascal reminded us centuries ago that to mean anything, the rule of law and the world of power must be successfully connected, since, as he put it, “law without power is impotent, and power without law is tyranny.” 

But all the institutions we have created — the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the UN, the ICC, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) — really the entire global architecture, are only as strong as our individual and collective will to use them to good purpose. The Nuremberg Trials worked because the victorious powers after World War II were prepared to use principles of international justice to make a point about accountability. The best one can say about successive efforts to rally around these same principles is that the result has been uneven. 

Unprovoked attacks by one country against another are rightly labeled “aggression”, but in 1956, three members of the Security Council (the British and French in Suez, and the Soviet Union in Hungary) got away without accountability. So have many other countries. After much debate and negotiation, a statute was drafted in Rome to establish the ICC, which celebrates its twenty fifth anniversary this July. The Rome Statute clearly set out named crimes against humanity, including genocide, and established a court which could hold individuals responsible for committing such crimes. But the journey to accountability has proven to be long and difficult. Three permanent members of the Security Council — Russia, China, and the United States — have not ratified the Statute, and they are joined by about a third of the member states of the UN. 

Canada has been a strong supporter of the Court from the outset, but Pascal’s historic reminder of the weakness of a legal structure that lacks universal support and capacity to enforce has been a lived experience these past 25 years. The wheels of international justice turn very slowly.  Russia’s war on and in Ukraine will be a test as to whether they turn at all. 

The Genocide Convention, which followed soon after the Nuremberg Trials, is now being tested again at the ICJ by Gambia on the Rohingya issue, and by Ukraine on Russian behaviour in their country. So is the Convention on Torture, where Canada and the Netherlands have joined forces to challenge the behaviour of the government of Syria.

My final point in my report on the Rohingya crisis was for a more “joined up” effort both at home and abroad. That need has grown exponentially since 2018. The accelerating impacts of climate change, the fissures opened by the uneven global response to the pandemic, and the terrible global consequences of Russia’s attack on Ukraine have all created an even greater need for collective action. Many countries feel they are facing the “polycrisis” alone, and will turn to any harbour in the storm.  This is a time for an even greater global commitment, and not for any of us to turn away. 

A practical example facing us head-on is the current crisis in Haiti, an example of what Thomas Hobbes called centuries ago the “war of all against all”.  Murders, kidnappings, widespread corruption, and the weakest of all possible state institutions have combined to create a deeply destructive situation in a country that has been beset by a plague of challenges for its entire existence. Canada has agreed to increase substantially its support for greater security in the country, and Haiti is the largest recipient of Canadian aid in the hemisphere. 

But there is clearly more to be done. We do not want to repeat the errors of the past, where interventions have, in the end, only bought temporary stability, and have left a legacy of bitterness and resentment. But neither “benign neglect” nor “strategic patience” will work either. We are now engaged in efforts to pull together a better strategy, and to match that with speedy implementation. Meanwhile, Port-au-Prince is burning, and there is no room for complacency, turf wars, or allowing wishful thinking to be a basis for policy. The key objective has to be to work in partnership with Haitians, and with Haitian institutions. 

Let me close with the words of Vladimir Kara-Murza, recently sentenced to 25 years in prison by a Russian court for the crime of telling the truth.

“But I also know that the day will come when the darkness over our country will dissipate. When black will be called black and white will be called white; when, at the official level, it will be recognized that two times two is still four; when a war will be called a war, and a usurper a usurper; and when those who kindled and unleashed this war, rather than those who tried to stop it, will be recognized as criminals.”

Bob Rae is Canada’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations.