from the russian capital top stories now syria's first steps to democratic reform ridiculed by the u.s. as washington stops just shy of labeling president assad a war criminal while allegedly pumping weapons into the war torn state. france spain greece the czech republic unfolding and yesterday protests hit the e.u. as governments hack and slash policies leave economies and public patience at the points of collapse. the man charge of the murder of prominent russian journalist anna politkovskaya says the killing may have been orchestrated in london by

a fugitive russian businessman and a suspected chechen terrorists. i'll be back with more on this story as more of. the meantime on cross-talk peter navarro and his guests get hot under the collar of a what the global economy thinks it should do about war torn syria heated debate next on altie. well the perks science technology innovation all the list of elements from around russia we've got the future covered. and if you. want to. know him well come across talk i'm futile about the right to protect

or the right to penetrate as syria continues down the path of destruction and civil war there are loud voices on the international stage demanding some form of outside intervention to end the violence and death is international are moving from sovereignty is right to sovereignty as responsibility. to. cross-talk the possible intervention into syria i'm joined by philip kahn lived in london he is a lecturer in international conflict at the university of kent a member of the international studies association and the british international studies association also in london we have eight in hair he is director of the security and international relations program at the university of westminster and in geneva we cross the stephen hines he is an international lawyer and a professor at the geneva center for security policy all right gentlemen crosstalk roles in effect that means you can jump any time you want eighteen if i can go to you are two p right to protect our right to penetrate nation states what is that

because we saw libya and we have syria on the agenda ok and i think we all would agree that syria and libya are not great powers. yes well it is usually used to refer to the responsibility to protect the right to protect but possibly the right to protect as it is a better way of understanding this principle because. what all to peace and surely stands for is a discretionary entitlement the security council may intervene if it determines that a particular situation constitutes a threat to international peace and security but the problem with our two p. is that it's under no obligation to do anything and essentially what ought to be has done is very very little it's created a slogan and certainly it's entered into the political discourse and many people refer to it in academia and international politics but it has changed absolutely nothing when it comes to international relations and particularly the international

community's response to intrastate crises and the situation in syria i think is very obvious evidence to back that up it's a classic case of the great powers choosing when and where to intervene and the humanitarian situation on the ground you know plays very little role in that determination you know what i was trying to get with my first question i mean strong nations have sovereignty will under this doctrine but weak nations are made to be made responsible it seems to me that if there's not a double standard in play right here if you're not a strong country then other people can tell you how to behave. now i'm going to i'm going to what is going to say was i don't want go ahead oh yeah yeah i mean i think that's right and i would my would go further i think that the responsibility the idea of sovereignty is response ability does not only mean that effectively we countries have less sovereignty but also that it. undermines democracy and accountability within all countries themselves because the idea of the

responsibility to protect i think means that states are effectively responsible for their people rather than responsible to their people and that's the distinction which the responsibility to protect introduces so those states are now seen to be responsible to the international community rather than accountable to their own people and to meet the interests of their own people and so for that reason i think . the idea that the responsibility to protect can offer anything to the people of syria or that it stands in support of an idea of accountable or popular representative or democratic syrian government is totally ridiculous ok stephen we have to dissenting voices here how do you come out on this here because there are so many examples out there what about brainwave why why can't to an outside country and say you know you've been invaded by your neighbor here you have an opaque government why don't we have a humanitarian intervention to save the people of bahrain what about gaza why can't we have a country to go in there and protect gazans when israel attacks them i mean it

seems to be full of double standards go ahead. well there are double standards here in a sense if you look at them in that way but can i just go back to responsibility versus rights there is no i as an international lawyer i look at the the way that this particular so-called norm has developed over the last thirteen years or so and it was really kicked off by a commission that met after the nato intervention over kosovo in one nine hundred ninety nine what was interesting about that was of course that intervention was conducted without a u.n. security council mandate. and the way that international law. in this respect is that the u.n. security council is in effect the authority under un law that can grant approval or give a mandate to a state or a group of states to intervene in the way that we're discussing up until kosovo up until the responsibility to protect report there was no doubt that this was based

on the idea of sovereign states having the right to intervene if they felt it was necessary or appropriate i think what i want to pay as it's evolved since nine hundred ninety nine and certainly the two thousand and one commission process the way that it's are involved is the jurisprudential underpinnings now of the un security council reaching a deliberate reaching a mandate to intervene has shifted from the basic understanding that a collection of states have a right to do something to the idea that states are actually in the position of having some measure of responsibility to do something so i don't think one can dismiss it. i mean whatever if i go to aden i mean i thought i still feel very suspicious of this because i see geopolitical politics behind it i mean the united states invaded iraq without any kind of u.n. mandate ok and it's about eight it was applying sponsibility to protect in some form or another but it's just the picking you know it's the west picking on people

he doesn't like ok and it's the using these great words of responsibility protecting civilians i mean it's easier to swallow maybe for western audiences what do you think. well in principle i don't have a problem with the idea of states having a responsibility to protect our own citizens and nor do i have a problem with the idea of the international community having a responsibility to intervene if necessary to protect citizens who are suffering egregious human rights violations under you know committed by the states that to me seems a perfectly logical premise however my problem with responsibly to protect isn't that it fundamentally disrupts the relationship between states and its citizens are that facilitates great power intervention we've always had great power interventions long before to pay the problem i have what it is that in situations like this in syria and in other situations since or two people launched in two thousand and one we've had a catalogue of interesting crises where there has been no international reaction of any kind precisely because it does not change anything in international law or

international politics it simply reaffirms the existing privileges that the p five and so long as the international community's response to international crises is predicated on the national interests of the p five then we would have the erratic record of intervention that we had prior to or to be when in the one nine hundred ninety s. the security council significantly expanded its understanding of its chapter seven powers and that's the problem with r two p. it's not that it has created a new school printer vention a previously didn't exist a great powers have always abused humanitarian claims in the past directly in the eighteenth and nineteenth century that's nothing new the problem is the selective implementation of r.t. in the fact that for all the noise that it has generated in the last ten years it has achieved very very little when you think about that philip i mean it's a pretty spotty record i mean if you still if you look at what happened in libya it's when nato started bombing when the death rate started to climb dramatically i mean again i mean this is the law of unintended consequences i mean it was nato when they're under the guise of. the mandate to stop death and destruction but

actually accelerated it and it wasn't given a mandate to change the regime which it did in this is what again this kind of mission creep with syria under the r two p. they're going to try to get rid of assad using nice words. i agree i mean and i disagree with aiden in terms of the idea that the responsibility to protect has had no effect or is insignificant or doesn't change anything politically legally i think it does and it does so for the worse if you take for it i mean while it's true that great powers have always been able to have their own way i don't see in the past they don't see that that's an argument for abolishing whatever legal barriers stand in their way to make intervention easier and having those legal barriers and political barriers in place is one way of making it easier to hold power to account rather than allowing for the last restrained and unaccountable exercise of power by the permanent five members of the security council or by any

other large major military power so i do think the responsibility to protect and along the lines that you said in relation to what happened in libya were a mandate for civilian protection gave enormous scope for the nato powers to effectively mount a campaign of regime change and i should also add to mean a very similar thing happened at the same time in ivory coast in cote d'ivoire where a mandate a u.n. mandate for civilian protection effectively allowed un peacekeepers who were stationed there to overthrow an incumbent to overthrow the incumbent government so it's a much it's a much wider field of what's actually happening and i do think it has significant and important consequences i mean in the past perhaps while great powers can still intervene in the affairs of smaller states they had to disguise the way in which they did by pretending to support client regimes or claiming that they were intervening because they had been invited in or supporting rebels covertly whatever

it was there was always some they had to pay homage to the principle that intervention was seen to be a negative thing and that it was seen to be dictatorial interference in the affairs of other states now the responsibility to protect with the rise of the responsibility to protect and ideas of humanitarian intervention it makes it much easier. for intervention to take place and for it to be seen as legitimate rather than something that's illegitimate and corrosive of international order it's very interesting stephen it sounds like to me to same song but it's a do it's the same song but a different dance that's that's what philip saying i want to. thank you for asking me to do so because i i actually don't believe that the evidence so far suggests that this is giving great powers a. car blown approval to intervene this is simply nonsense the idea that iraq was conducted the invasion of iraq was conducted under a responsibility to protect is just perverse it wasn't that was that was not the argument put forward by you know you know what you know it's going to be

a cake walk you know they're going to reassess the raiders i mean come on they did there was the only poor people after a decade of sanctions needed to be liberated and were democracy very very serious middle east and really that was tiring i am well i am look i am looking i am looking at the international lore of this and i'm telling you in fact tickly that are to pay was never part of either the british or american justification for the invasion of iraq now as it happens i opposed that in from that intervention i thought that it was unlawful and strategically unnecessary but i'm afraid that it's wrong to suggest that if i can intervene if i can i don't think you gentlemen we're going to get to a short break and after that short break we'll continue our discussion on the contradictory situation in syria state r.t. . if you.

want to. wealthy british style. guide. markets. find out what's really happening to the global economy for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines today and to cause a report. we all make choices. sometimes it's tough. but it can be an easy. choice be left to fate. it can be. limited. we can come.

it's always personal. except one day. when choice matters to everyone. and. welcome back to cross talk i'm about to mind you we're talking about syria and outside military intervention. ok phil before i went to the break you wanted to jump in there respond to something that stephen said in geneva go right ahead. yeah i don't i mean it may not have been in the black letter of the security council debates or in the legal justifications given for the anglo american invasion of iraq but the idea that

humanitarian intervention the responsibility to protect had no role to play in iraq i think is deeply disingenuous it systematically lowered the barriers their political barriers to man interventions of that kind and both george bush and tony blair repeatedly invoked the idea of overthrowing saddam's tyranny a very strong humanitarian argument that has been made in many other cases where military intervention has been launched and in tony blair's memoirs he very may very clearly makes the case that he saw the intervention in iraq along the lines of the responsibility to protect so i'm not sure that the strict legal criteria in relation to what happened in iraq are as important as the political question and the fact that it was politically legitimated on the grounds on largely humanitarian grounds as well as the invisible never diff never found weapons of mass destruction ok aden you would be all right stephen you want to reply and then i'll go to yeah now i am coming back to this all because i think we've got to pin this one where we've got to pin this one right down the legal justification from both united

states and united kingdom had nothing whatever to do with our two it related in particular in the british case it related to a supposed security council mandate dating back to ninety ninety and the the idea that r two p. had anything to do with our to do with iraq is i think completely false i'm not saying that they there weren't certain post conflict post invasion justifications based on humanitarian arguments there certainly were but they had nothing to do with the legal justification and we'll come back to this whole business of where the no no i just want to finish on this because think it's quite important to make the point but nothing in the r. to evolvement process from the. international commission's report in two thousand and one through a high level panel report that was subsequently commissioned by kofi annan through kofi annan the report to the world summit in two thousand and five nothing in there

recommended anything other than the decision to intervene in these circumstances militarily should rest with the security council within the united nations and so in some senses i would argue that our two pig he has in some ways strengthened the role of the security council and made it less likely although new maybe or maybe it's very it's created a lot more paralysis even if i can go to you because russia and china it's good to get been given a lot of criticism in the world for its vetoing of any more intervention into syria and the russians and the chinese will go back and say look what you did in libya you abused that mandate because of this new doctrine in the russians and the chinese are going to not budge on this one or if there is it'll be much more nuance now what i'm getting at is it art this doctrine is finding itself dead in the water because it was abused in libya. i don't think so i mean russia and china's position on this the resolution that was put to the security council that russia and china vetoed made no mention of military intervention it's very important regime change

is mentioned in there and in the need to change the political order on the ground so it's under the same. general and slaughters its own people like that and is an elected and has ruled for forty years and i don't think it's unreasonable to discuss regime change with the people on the ground in syria i mean we have always and we have to continue to have some understanding of the situation on the ground in syria and the suffering that the people are enjoying there in a situation like this where this government totally on elected government engages in this kind of atrocity against its own people of course they begin to look a little bit. you know like this doctor and so what would you suggest doing ok. i don't like all two people so i said because of what stephen said it has strengthened the security council and we have to sure every now and again in new york were the members fall into a room we all know are going to vote and nothing really is resolved or to pay has as stephen said strengthen the security council the power of the security council

is precisely the problem in these situations we've always had great power interventions with or without security council approval for idea of sovereignty is being inviolability is totally out of date and has been for at least twenty years the notion that states consider themselves to be beyond any external interference i mean we had the genocide convention in one thousand forty myriad international treaties since then recognizing some role for the international community in intrastate affairs and that's that's all i welcome the problem i. disagree with what i've been saying. i disagree with this disagree with this idea of the sovereign impunity is purely there to protect governments so that they can slaughter their own people and have no international accountability the idea of noninterference isn't about protecting genocide or governments the idea of not interference inside in the affairs of other states is to protect the idea of representative government so the role of the people in determining the syrian or

how representative government should behave is the point so i think regime change isn't just. represented by external powers. the question is preserving if the question is preserving the rights of the. people. here is. going to. be to reply go right ahead. you know how representative is the assad government how can the people in syria exercise this idea this right of self-determination that's precisely what they're attempting to do it seems the government is slaughtering them now what do we do in that context the sovereignty has unfortunately in this is the dark side of sovereignty as provided with the means to engage in these kind of activities and for us to say well it's sovereign inviolability provide enables independence and

some of the terminations course in most situations it does but in this situation there has to be limits it would be ridiculous to claim otherwise and it's also a position that's totally out of step with international political understanding of sovereignty and international legal understanding of some of the it's a totally outdated seventeenth century notion of sovereignty all right gentlemen i said i didn't even like to go to stephen go ahead stephen you want to jump in there go ahead yes they are i think one of the biggest problems and i'm sure that your viewers will be confused by this but one of the one of the biggest problems of course you've got if you've got legal issues on one side and political issues on the other and these two these two different dimensions to the problem do tend to conflict with one another i mean i i have some sympathy what i'm. saying about the desirability of being able to do something and his frustration with the security council having apparently been strengthened which is which is my tentative view at the moment by our to pity the trouble is with this is that back in one nine hundred

forty five when the charter was drafted there had to be a realistic assessment of the importance the sheer importance of great powers the five that were originally put there are still there the importance of ensuring that nothing would create such a catastrophe within the internet international system that the great powers would end up in conflict again this is the dial emma that particularly those were international lawyers with some sympathy with the notion of human security and intervention in these. stances have to confront we cannot intervene in every set of circumstances because to do so would be political that's not realistic i mean look at give me an example phil before i can go to you ok let's say iran is watching what's going on in syria and it invokes r two p. and does an intervention ok i mean if the west does it it's ok because they're western powers they're good guys but if iran does something like that using the same doctrine it will be called invasion well you can do that if i may john kerry

i'm going to force anything old to see the right. no i think i mean i think if you take the example of the russian intervention in georgia which was defended initially at least on humanitarian grounds it was roundly sneered at by western states and by western commentators the idea that the russians would dare to invoke a humanitarian justification there when clearly the only states which are expected to be allowed to you know it belies the discourse of unitarianism or western powers so i think it's very the there's talk of universalism in those talks as if these rights are free floating and belong to anybody in principle but in reality we know that it's going to be the great powers they decide how they're applied the great powers on the security council in particular the western powers the western powers britain can i can i come back in here because you said what about if iran wanted to invoke this are to play well equipped of course you could try taking the issue to the security council which is the body that is in a position to make those if you think i mean we should as we can any traction will

get any traction which we're just be sneered at right well it probably would be this i was alluding true but at the site but in the same sense do acknowledge that the very fact that there appears to be a problem at the moment is caused by both the russians and the chinese indicating that they will veto so you can have it both ways you can say that this is a this is a means for the west to intervene all the time when clearly in the case of syria both russia and china are making it very clear at the moment that they have no truck with nato or anybody else for that matter intervening in syria there are checks here and the tracks we have to accept that they are uncomfortable tricks they do produce these sorts of deila most but they are clearly tricks and they exist not only for iran but also for the western powers as well what is the future of our tepee where is this doctrine going to go because it seems like it was really cheered on for libya and now i now i notice western media doesn't like to cover

libya too much because it's just. one big mess ok with militias running around in what not ok but it's still a victory for nato when it's justified through this doctrine here i mean where does we go from here because it doesn't look like it's going to work with with syria and unfortunately given the limited reports we have coming out of syria the situation on the ground there is quite dire. well i mean the responsibility protect is. a slogan and it's a very good slogan it's a very catchy slogan and like a lot of slogans like that i'm sure it will have a future in you know the chattering that goes on amongst politicians at the security council but in actual practice it will have very little practical influence and as you said a lot of people in two thousand and eleven welcomed the intervention in libya as being all too paean action it's important to remember that in the security council resolution sanctioning action in libya there's no mention of the international community's responsibility to protect the bases for action was chapter seven the responsibility protect is mentioned once all in the context of gadhafi has

responsibility to protect his own people has no sense that this was the international community recognizing its collective responsibility to act on behalf of the libyan people there was a gentleman i would have you know rather your fascinating conversation many thanks to my guest today in london and in geneva and thanks to our viewers for watching us to see you next time and remember cross talk to.

me it's easy to. see the.