Andrey Yurov: International civil society is now lagging behind the politicians

Today’s crisis of the international law is largely caused by the weak global civil society, not only by the negligence of security issues on the part of politicians and corresponding structures.

Why it is the presidents of four countries who negotiate about the peace in Ukraine, not the OSCE and UN that were specially formed for this purpose? And what is the situation with the international civil society today? What can be a basis for reforming the system of international law? “EuroBelarus” Information Service asked Andrey Yurov, a member of the Russian Presidential Council for Human Rights, about it in its exclusive interview.

- How effective is the system of international law protection for settling modern armed conflicts? Why is such format of negotiations as the meeting of the “Normandy Four” in Minsk required to find peace?

- For me the very fact of such negotiations means that the structures such as UN, OSCE, and Council of Europe that were created during the last 50 years in the world and in Europe for resolving these issues and providing security in its broad meaning work badly. And now politicians are trying to find other formats. But this says about the inefficiency of the existing mechanisms. Well, at the time when they were created they might have worked properly, but now we have to admit that now safety is in the hands of absolutely different structures, in the hands of bilateral, trilateral, etc. negotiations. And for me this is a huge step back from the idea of a united common international law, when everything works as a united mechanism, when in case of any violations corresponding peaceful, not military measures are taken: monitoring, separating the sides, ceasefire, and so on. And it became clear that this works poorly already in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and other countries. We have to admit that the last 15 years international mechanisms started failing to cope with their functions, and neither West nor East did anything real to restore these mechanisms.

- Does the problem lie in human factor or in institutional?

- I think in both. When we are talking about the human factor, we don’t say that some politicians are smarter than the others. But now, apparently, we got a pleiad of politicians who don’t believe in the international law themselves, but rather trust some other things. And the US today doesn’t go in the vanguard of strengthening the international law, which is very sad. Perhaps, if both the East and the West had other politicians, who would be thinking about the structures o the international security system, the situation might be developing differently now. But clearly, today they have other priorities.

- There could be a system of international bureaucracy that established frames that don’t allow working effectively, couldn’t it?

- It could. Giant bureaucratic apparatuses have long been working for the challenges that they have been created for. We have noted long time ago that the OSCE turned into a talking-shop for stating banalities, and the UN has also demonstrated its poor efficiency over the last years, both in Europe and in the whole world. If we consider the bloodiest wars of the late XX – the beginning of the XXI century, we’ll see that UN’s role in their settlement and prevention was minimal; we don’t even know about many of these conflicts.

- In your opinion, could the Ukrainian conflict be a start for reforming the international law system?

- It could be, if there is will for that; and not only politicians’ will. I observe some other process here, which is very painful and unpleasant for me – I see how the united international society is becoming weaker. I.e. some civil society organizations in certain countries might be very strong and huge; however, I hear no strong united voice of international civil society. If there were one, then simultaneously with the negotiations of the presidents from the “Normandy Four” a group of civil society representatives would be holding negotiations and elaborating suggestions for politicians. But it never happened. And now international civil society is lagging behind politicians. Civil society organizations are busy resolving the so-called “vegetarian” issues: hunger, fight on one bad occurrence, and fight on the other one. These are all important things; I’m not saying that this work is unnecessary. I see no strong civil society leaders that would be able to form its international agenda and make suggestions on the part of their nations, not their governments. There were such processes in the 90s, during the war in Yugoslavia.

That is why when I say that there should be will I mean both politicians and civil society. I think that the world has changed that much that the international system cannot be reformed by politicians only; we need a second party. But we don’t have one. It is very weak.

- As far as I understand not only international law but also international human rights are undergoing crisis now…

- Of course. One cannot happen without the other. Human rights sphere is very specialized part in international law. But we understand that if the international law in confused, if there are no corresponding mechanisms, human rights sphere starts to slip. I.e. on the one hand, we have such institutions as European Court and United Nations Human Rights Committee, but we see that no one really listens to these institutions. No one is hurrying up to ratify the statute of the International Criminal Court – neither Russia, nor Ukraine, China, and the US. So the situation is more complicated and dramatic than it might appear at first sight. There are states that behave in a less disgraceful way. But unfortunately, the latter don’t put every effort so that to strengthen international law. Over the last 70 years no world law institutions were invented but for the International Criminal Court, which is weird, as our world changed a lot and new, more efficient institutions were to be invented over these 70 years. But I don’t see them; neither the politicians nor the civil society elaborates them.

Read the continuation of the interview with Andrei Jurau in the next few days at en.eurobelarus.info.