Statement by H.E. Ambassador and Permanent Representative Bob Rae at the UN General Assembly Debate on the Protection of Civilians

June 23, 2022 – UN General Assembly

Checked against delivery

Thank you very much Mr. president.

Canada supports the statement made by the Group of Friends of Responsibility to Protect. We would like to thank the Secretary-General for his report, and I’d also like to thank Madam Nderitu [the UN Special Advisor for the Prevention of Genocide] for her speech earlier. And we're very pleased to see that the report focuses on children and young people.

The promotion and protection of the rights of children during conflicts and violence is a priority for Canada and has been so for many years. Today, I must speak about the devastating effects of the war of aggression carried out by Russia against Ukraine which, amongst other things, is a war of aggression against the children of Ukraine.

As we speak today in this assembly, Russian forces are indiscriminately bombing schools and hospitals, subjecting Ukrainian women and girls to brutal sexual and gender-based violence, and forcibly displacing and deporting Ukrainian children by the hundreds of thousands. This is a war against the very future of Ukraine. As Russia seeks to destroy Ukrainian identity as a sovereign and as an independent nation.

I would remind all of us today in the assembly that after the terrible events of World War II, this assembly passed the Genocide Convention which states as follows, and I'm quoting for it because I think it's that we be constantly reminded of what it says, “In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such a) killing members of the group; b) causing seriously serious bodily harm or mental harm to members of the group; c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group”, let me repeat “e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group”. That is a definition of genocide.

Ukraine's application to the International Court of Justice on Russia's unsubstantiated allegations of genocide in Ukraine is historic. And the conclusions of the Court in ordering that, on an interim basis, that Russia should withdraw its troops from Ukraine, is an order of the International Court of Justice of which Russia is a member and which Russia has refused to comply. We strongly encourage and fully support the Secretary-General in using all the tools at the UN's disposal to hold Russia accountable for grave violations committed against children in Ukraine.

There are moments when bold action is required and this is such a moment. For our part, we will continue to promote accountability of Russia's crime violations of international law in Ukraine, including through the International Criminal Court, the International court of justice and national courts invoking international jurisdiction. Just as we will continue to demand accountability in Ethiopia, in Myanmar, in Syria, in Yemen, and indeed, all over the world.

President,

Over the last 13 years, this assembly has discussed the issue of the responsibility to protect. We better understand now what this principle means and what it doesn't. The responsibility to protect does not only concern the use of military force unlike what some people in this assembly continue to claim and I'm certain that they will do the same again in this debate.

It is not a tool to interfere in state sovereignty. On the contrary, the responsibility to protect consists in strengthening the responsible sovereignty of states. Above all, it is a question of prevention, using all the tools available fully respecting the UN Charter and international law, and prevention of criminal atrocity crimes is everyone's business.

We collectively placed R2P permanently on the assembly's agenda as we appropriately have done. And as we look forward to future engagement on this issue, we would like to share two thoughts for consideration.

First, recent reports of the Secretary-General have expanded our understanding of R2P from a thematic perspective. Moving forward, future reports by the UN should focus on country situations and provide assessments of risks and recommendations. To put it simply, we have to become more granular in the meaning of R2P and how we can effectively put it to good use. It was not developed and agreed to by this body to be a purely theoretical exercise or to look at the situation from a great height.

The principle is both a moral call to action, but it's also an implementable framework for policy and for action. And it's up to us in the General Assembly to help to make that a reality. So receiving more and timely information from the UN including through the Secretary-General's reports will help us very much in doing so.

Second Mr. president, we continue to witness the paralyzing effects of the abuse of the veto of the Security Council. Citizens in Ukraine, in Syria and in Myanmar who are appealing for Security Council's action. Indeed, if you go on the internet, you can see the civilians in Myanmar, civilians in Syria, civilians in Ukraine putting up R2P signs saying R2P. It's a call to us to respond. It's not something we can ignore. We unanimously in the Security Council and in the General Assembly adopted the principle of R2P. And so we have no excuse for not responding.

The veto is undemocratic; the veto is anachronistic. In the face of Council deadlock, we have seen this assembly assume its responsibilities quite rightly. There has been important momentum in bringing more transparency to the use of the veto, including through the recently adopted veto initiative resolution brought forward by my friend the permanent representative of Liechtenstein. But the General Assembly's powers do not stop there. As the ICJ has said, the General Assembly has, and I quote, “is also to be concerned with international peace and security”. The notion that somehow we've done our job when we say “oh that's the Security Council's job”, that's not correct.

The General Assembly still has an ongoing responsibility to play its part. And so we believe we should continue down some paths together. The first path is to continue to find ways to constrain or otherwise limit the use of veto particularly where it is preventing the Security Council from acting to prevent breaches of the peace and atrocity crimes.

The implementation of the veto initiative resolution is a very positive first step. But there's more to be done including has been mentioned today by my colleague from Mexico including by implementing the Code of Conduct and the French Mexican initiative, as well as through the work of the intergovernmental negotiations on Security Council reform in which I must say Canada continues to seek to prevent the expansion of veto powers, and indeed we think we should go further and ask ourselves whether the veto should exist at all.

The second path is to further explore the role of the General Assembly in preventing and responding to atrocity crimes. In line with the UN Charter and in complementarity to a Security Council that we hope will be able to function better and indeed we demand that it functioned better. A more fulsome debate on this issue will be very welcome and we will encourage it.

Mr. president this assembly and the United Nations have evolved over time as we have confronted new threats and challenges; R2P is very much part of that evolution of our thinking. As civilians around the world face unprecedented levels of conflict, violence, displacement, threats to their personal security, it is our responsibility to continue to evolve ourselves in order to meet the letter and the spirit of the commitments that we made in signing the Charter, and in unanimously adopting the principle of the responsibility to protect.

If I may, Mr. president, close on a personal note. June the 23rd 1985 was the date that up till that time, was the worst civilian air disaster in history. It's known to us now as the Air India bombing. At the time that it occurred, we know that a bomb was placed on a plane in Vancouver Canada, that it went right through the Canadian transport system to another flight going from Montreal, and that the plane blew up off the coast of Ireland.

20 years after that I was asked personally by the Prime Minister of the day to do a review of what had happened, how had we failed, what had we done through our security systems, through our policing systems, through all of the information that we were unable to put into action. What had we done to protect and how did we fail to protect.

So as I was coming up today, I said it's June the 23rd so when we talk about the responsibility to protect, Canada's not pointing a finger at anyone. We're pointing a finger at ourselves. The responsibility to protect civilians, to protect human life, to prevent them from attacks of whatever kind, of whatever nature, are absolutely fundamental to the responsibility of every state. And what we've tried to do in the responsibility to protect is to create an architecture that doesn't deny the responsibility of the state. It supplements it, it adds to it, and it then says we all have a responsibility to assist in protecting human life. And as we see what's going on today in the world in Myanmar, in Syria, in Ukraine, we have to understand that so far, this architecture is not complete. We've started to build it, but we have not succeeded in implementing it. And that remains the challenge of our time and something we to which we must all commit ourselves.

Thank you very much Mr. President.