From a handful of students in a classroom at Brown University to over one thousand diplomats from around the globe at the 2005 World Summit, Thomas Weiss has spoken to all kinds of audiences about the international responsibility to uphold human rights.
Yet when he came to Boston College on Wednesday night, he treated his audience exactly as he would have any diplomat. With the urgency of a man desperate to make a change, he spoke with optimism to those whom he believed could help him create it.
Weiss, who, among other things, is responsible for the creation of the Global Center for the Responsibility to Protect, began his speech by addressing the importance of the protection of human sovereignty and what that protection entails.
"The responsibility to protect occupies a new middle ground in international human rights," Weiss said.
The idea that countries have a responsibility to protect citizens of the world has broken new ground for three main reasons.
The first was the newly accepted belief that it is every state's responsibility to respect the human rights of its citizens. If the state is unable or unwilling to do so, the responsibility is then transferred to the international community.
The second reason for this critical breakthrough was a shift in focus from the rights of countries to interfere in the issues of other nations to the right of the individual victims to protection.
Finally, is the critical understanding of the importance of acting to prevent a humanitarian crisis in the case of an intervention, and the understanding that there is a responsibility to mend the society interfered with.
Supporting the idea of the protection of human sovereignty is the Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, established by the Canadian government in reaction to the aftermath of the crimes against humanity that took place in Bosnia and Rwanda in the late 20th century.
The committee has been criticized in the past for its masked imperialism. Many developing nations fear that the responsibility to protect will be abused; some claim that it already has been.
"The single most important explanation in why that argument is hard to dismiss is Iraq, Weiss said.
"After the links to al-Qaida and weapons of mass destruction evaporated as a justification, both in London and Washington, the argument became 'we are doing this for humanitarian purposes.'"
Weiss, who was appointed as the research director of the Committee, responded to these accusations by claiming that the arguments in this situation are hard to dismiss.
"That would have been a great argument for Iraq in the 1980s and certainly in the 1990s, but not in the early 2000s," Weiss said.
"There may be a situation in Iraq with withdrawal of U.S troops where we may create a humanitarian disaster of major proportions.
This reality has made it impossible to dismiss as outlandish the argument that the notion of the responsibility to protect is a guise to hide Western imperialism," he said.
In addition to his support for the protection of sovereign rights, Weiss has been an active participant in the ongoing reform of the U.N. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan presented plans for reform "In larger Freedom" in March 2005.
Along with many other reforms came the creation of the U.N. Human Rights Council, which replaced the highly criticized U.N. Commission on Human Rights.
Weiss emphasized that one of the major reforms of the U.N. is the increased voice of NGOs and human activists.
"There is a first United Nations that consists of the arena where leaders of nations make decisions," Weiss said.
"There is a second U.N. which consists of the people who work for the leaders, who are civil servants for the governments who have a say in decisions. What I am interested in increasingly are the private voices. Private voices are the real input that moves this whole machine along. The first U.N. and the second U.N. needs to be complimented virtually always by these commissions and NGOs."
Weiss then criticized the candidates in the election for completely ignoring the issue of human rights in their campaigns.
He also reacted to the recent mass killings in Kenya by saying that he praises the African Union for realizing that "there is a potential of ugliness and trying to stop it."
"The danger is in acting too little, not too much," he said.
He also criticized the African Union, however, by saying that they are unable to put the boots on the ground or provide the communication or equipment necessary.
He proposed that it would be beneficial to provide smaller, more powerful regional institutions in the future.
Weiss concluded his speech with another wave of optimism.
"People matter and ideas matter," he said. "Putting the two together in specific moments is imperative."
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