20 Mar The (International) Right to Bear Arms
As the world continues to wring its hands over the slow-motion genocide in Darfur, libertarian legal scholars are beginning to point out one possible solution that doesn’t involve the United Nations or even NATO: Arm the victims of the Sudanese genocide. Indeed, they would go farther and enshrine an international human right to resist genocide, that includes the right to procure weapons to resist genocide.
Here is an abstract of a forthcoming article in the Notre Dame Law Review by the Volokh Conspiracy’s David Kopel, Paul Gallant, and Joanne Eisen. (Via Instapundit)
Closely examining the Darfur, Sudan, genocide, and making reference to other genocides, this Article argues that the genocide prevention strategies which are currently favored by the United Nations are ineffective. The Article details the failures of targeted sanctions, UN peacekeepers, and other anti-genocide programs. Then, the Article analyzes the Genocide Convention and other sources of international human rights law. Because the very strong language of the Genocide Convention forbids any form of complicity in genocide, and because the Genocide Convention is jus cogens (meaning that it prevails over any conflicting national or international law), this Article concludes that the Genocide Convention forbids any interference, including interference based on otherwise-valid laws, against the procurement of defensive arms by groups which are being victimized by genocide.
I’m not sure yet what I think of this reading of the Genocide Convention, but it is surely an interesting approach at least from a policy standpoint. This is not a reading of the Genocide Convention likely to be taken up by many international law scholars. But maybe they should.
While I agree that the response of the U.S., the U.N. and of the world in general to genocide has been pathetic, I am more than a little sceptical that the answer is “more guns.” I have not seen a single example where the flow of small arms into a war zone has led to stability as opposed to increased instability.
This relates to one of the things that troubles me about John Bolton: his about face on U.S. support for the Small Arms Convention, declaring that the U.S. believes in a moral right to bear arms. Not seeing (or refusing to see) the difference between a “right to bear arms” and trying to dry up the illegal small arms trade in Africa (and other parts of the world) does not help anyone, except maybe arms manufacturers and arms dealers.
On a more theoretical plane, this argument also reminds me of John Mearsheimer’s piece in the early 1990’s that Eurasian stability would be enhanced if Ukraine, Belarus, and other former Soviet republics had their own indepoendent nuclear arsenals. More nukes among more partiues equals more stability. I don’t see anyone wanting to revisit that thought-experiment.
This same discussion occurred during the problems in Bosnia in the mid-1990s. The UN arms embargo was seen by some as unbalanced, as it prevented the Bosnians Muslims from arming themselves against the Bosnian Serbs, who received military materiel from the Serbian government and army. It’s time to realize that the UN is simply incapable of protecting populaces from predation by sovereign entities.