Naming and shaming: The ICRC and the public/private divide

Millennium: Journal of International Studies

Volumn 34, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 449-460

  Warner, Daniel ^a  

^a GRADUATE INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL AND DEVELOPMENT STUDIES   (Switzerland)

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EID: 33645371251     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/03058298060340022201     Document Type: Article

References (43)

1. For an outstanding example of this dynamic, relating to Protestant thought, see Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society,(New York: Scribner, 1934).
2. The ICRC made public its dissatisfaction with the United States' failure to implement changes only after there had been leaks about is confidential reports.
3. At the time the BBC reported, 'In exchange for access, the committee has agreed to take any initial complaints directly to Washington. It publicises its views only when it feels they are not being heeded. In this instance, the ICRC says it has been urging the White House for months to make significant changes in Guantanamo'. 'Red Cross blasts Guantanamo', BBC News World Edition, 10 October 2003.
4. Gabor Rona, '"War" Doesn't Justify Guantanamo', Financial Times, 1 March 2004.
5. Jakob Kellenberger, 'Speaking Out or Remaining Silent in Humanitarian Work', International Review of the Red Cross 86, no. 855 (2004): 593-609.
6. Ibid., 598.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., 599.
9. The president's defense of a victim-oriented policy reflects the governing reasoning of the ICRC concerning speaking out. The ICRC gives the following outline of that reasoning: 'The ICRC determines the attitude it must adopt essentially using one criteria: the interest of the victims it is charged to protect and assist. Its specific role as a neutral intermediary between the Parties in conflict, its duty to treat without discrimination all the victims of armed conflicts, imposes on the ICRC to react in the face of observed or alleged violations of international humanitarian law only after having carefully weighed all the implications that such a reaction could have for the victims'. 'Les Demarches du Comité International de la Croix Rouge en cas de Violations du Droit International Humanitaire', Revue Internationale de la Croix Rouge, no. 278 (1981): 80, my translation.
10. As Mark Gibney has commented to me, there have been no really negative consequences for the now public declarations of the ICRC either for the direct victims or for other victims in other places. In fact, neither keeping silent nor going public seems to have enhanced the ICRC's work in the cases of Guantanamo and Iraq.
11. Kellenberger, 600.
12. Ibid, 601.
13. I have criticised the distinction between the humanitarian and the political in 'The Politics of the Political/Humanitarian Divide', International Review of the Red Cross 81, no. 833 (1999): 109-118.
14. Kellenberger, 601, 602. It should be noted that the consequentialist argument is used here to support the idea that public appeals generally do not work.
15. As Laurence Boisson de Chazournes and Luigi Condorelli note: 'The ICRC, which is as a general rule better placed than third Party States to know the situation on the ground, holds to a position of absolute discretion that it considers indispensable for performing an efficient activity from the humanitarian perspective. The ICRC does not exclude in extreme cases, which is to say when it is placed in a situation of complete powerlessness, that it considers that a public denunciation constitutes in the specific case a necessary last resort'. (Bisson de Chazournes and Condorelli, 'Quelques remarques à propos de l'obligation de «respecter et faire respecter» le droit international humanitaire «en toute circonstance»', in Studies and Essays in International Humanitarian Law and Red Cross Principles in Honoour of Jean Pictet, ed. C. Swinarsk (Geneva/The Hague: International Committee of the Red Cross/Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1984), 27, my translation.
16. Kellenberger, 605.
17. Ibid., 606.
18. For more on the history and politics of the ICRC, see David Forsythe, The Humanitarians: The International Committee of the Red Cross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
19. I avoid another type of consequentialist argument that might point out that the Red Cross receives about 40% of its budget from the United States. The consequences of criticising the United States under these conditions can only be imagined!
20. Weber first made the distinction in a speech titled 'Politics as a Vocation' in 1918 and appears in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and eds. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 77-128.
21. I have discussed the speech at length and its importance in International Relations in An Ethic of Responsibility in International Relations (Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner, 1991), 9-29.
22. The distinction Weber makes is a very important one in IR. With respect to it Stanley Hoffmann notes that any moral statecraft has to be an ethics of consequences, in the sense of being concerned for the foreseeable effects (Hoffmann, Duties Beyond Borders [Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1981] 28-29).
23. Joseph Nye says that the ethic of ultimate ends 'focuses on the quality of the person doing the act, and [the ethic of responsibility] focuses on the consequences of the act'. (Nye, Nuclear Ethics [New York: Free Press, 1986], 16).
24. Terry Nardin, 'Reason and Tradition: Recent Literature in Foreign Affairs', Ethics and International Affairs 2 (1988): 232.
25. Michael Walzer, 'Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands', Philosophy and Public Affairs 2 (1973): 160-180.
26. The silence of the ICRC concerning war crimes and testimony has been debated recently in the light of the establishment of International Criminal Court. We make an obvious distinction here between individual testimony by ICRC delegates against individuals for war crimes and patterns of behavior by Governments and going public by the ICRC itself. For more on the first problem, see Gabor Rona, 'The ICRC's Privilege Not to Testify: Confidentiality in Action', International Review of the Red Cross 84, no. 845 (2002): 207-220.
27. A similar irony is discussed in my article 'Ethics, Law and Unethical Compassion in the Kosovo Intervention', in The International Legal System in Quest of Universality, eds. Laurence Boisson de Chazournes and Vera Gowlland-Debbas (The Hague/London/Boston, Martinus Nijoff Publishers, 2001), 199-218.
28. Max Weber, 'Politics as a Vocation', 120.
29. Weber himself says, 'This is not to say that an ethic of ultimate ends is identical with irresponsibility, or that an ethic of responsibility is identical with unprincipled opportunism'. Ibid.
30. Weber, 127.
31. See Boisson de Chazournes and Condorelli, 'Common Article 1 of the Geneva Conventions Revisited: Protecting Collective Interests', International Review of the Red Cross 82, no. 837 (2000): 67-89;
32. Frits Kalshoven, 'The Undertaking to Respect and Ensure Respect in all Circumstances: From Tiny Seed to Ripening Fruit', Yearbook of International Humanitarian Law 2 (1999): 3-61;
33. and Vincent Chetail, 'The Contribution of the International Court of Justice to International Humanitarian Law', International Review of the Red Cross 85, no. 850 (2003): 235-269.
34. On the application of Article 1 to two additional protocols, see Boisson de Chazournes and Condorelli, 'Common Article 1', 68.
35. Ibid., 70. I understand that the ICRC is technically not part of Article 1.
36. Ibid., 75, emphasis added.
37. See Boisson de Chazournes and Condorelli, 'Quelques remarques', specifically 27-28.
38. Boisson de Chazournes and Condorelli, 'Common Article 1', 78.
39. See also Laurence Boisson de Chazournes, 'The Collective Responsibility of States to Ensure Respect for Humanitarian Principles', in Monitoring Human Rights in Europe: Comparing International Procedures and Mechanisms, eds. Arie Bloed, Liselotte Leicht, Manfred Nowak and Allan Rosas (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1993), 247-260.
40. We will not explore the possibility that gross violations of humanitarian law can be interpreted as a threat to or breach of the peace.
41. Statutes of the International Committee of the Red Cross adopted on 24 June 1998.
42. ICRC, 'Les Demarches', pp. 84-85, my translation.
43. On the occasion of the handing over more than 60,000 pages of World War II documents to Israel in 1997, George Willemin, Director of archives for the ICRC said,'[v]ery clearly, the ICRC's activities with regard to the Holocaust are sensed as a moral failure. The ICRC admits - yes - that it has kept silent with regard to the Holocaust, and I would say that this is the heart of the moral failure'. Associated Press, carried in the Virginian-Pilot, 8 October 1997, A10. Statements by the ICRC itself are more nuanced and reflect consequentialist and not moral reasoning. On the ICRC's website it says the following about the ICRC and the holocaust: 'In the summer of 1942, the ICRC debated whether to launch a general appeal on violations of international humanitarian law. It prepared a draft, but decided in the end not to issue the appeal, believing that it would not achieve the desired results. The ICRC therefore continued with its bilateral approaches'. The end of the section is most revealing: 'Apart from the work of Friedrich Born in Hungary and a few sporadic instances elsewhere, the ICRC's efforts to assist Jews and other groups of civilians persecuted during the Second World War were a failure. By taking part in the 1995 ceremony to commemorate the liberation of the Auschwitz camp, the ICRC's president, Cornelio Sommaruga, wanted to show that the organisation was fully aware of the gravity of the Holocaust and the need to keep the memory of it alive, so as to prevent any repetition of it. He paid tribute to all those who had suffered or lost their lives during the war and publicly regretted the past mistakes and shortcomings of the Red Cross with regard to the victims of the concentration camps'. [www.icrc.org/web/eng/ siteeng0.nsf/iwpList418/359CC4EF8] (29 March 2005). More specifically, in an improvised presentation in January 1995 at Auschwitz, president Sommaruga said the following: 'I am here for honoring the memory of all victims and for expressing admiration and solidarity to those that escaped Auschwitz. I say it with humility, aware of possible omissions and mistakes of the Red Cross in the past'. On file with the ICRC. Notice that president Sommaruga's statement does not identify the nature of the omissions or mistakes.