Excellency,
On behalf of the undersigned civil society organizations, we are writing to request your government’s explicit support for the new “Code of Conduct regarding Security Council action against genocide, crimes against humanity, or war crimes.
Over the past few years, the world has witnessed an intolerable rise in the commission of atrocities against civilians. Populations from Syria to the Central African Republic to South Sudan, to name but a few, suffer daily from the very same crimes that the international community has repeatedly vowed to prevent.
At such a moment of global instability, expectations have grown for preventive, timely, and decisive action by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), as the UN organ primarily tasked with the maintenance of international peace and security. The UNSC has indeed exerted leadership by taking recent action on a number of situations of atrocity crimes.
However, due to the veto power wielded irresponsibly by its Permanent Members, the UNSC has failed to adopt similarly strong measures in other cases where these crimes are imminent or occurring, for example in Syria, Palestine, Myanmar, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). Vetoing resolutions that attempt to prevent or respond to atrocities makes it difficult for the international community to uphold its Responsibility to Protect (RtoP, R2P), a landmark norm unanimously endorsed in the 2005 World Summit Outcome Document. Under RtoP, States and the international community agreed that they had an obligation to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing.
