Written evidence submitted by Ben Willis

Promoting Dialogue and Preventing Atrocities: The UK Government Approach

Executive Summary

This evidence submission highlights limitations in the UK government’s existing approach to the prevention of mass atrocities, as primarily set out in its July 2019 policy paper, and offers a number of recommendations that the Committee may wish to consider. The submission addresses all of the topics listed in the terms of reference and is organised into four sections:

1.                              The role of UK aid programmes in atrocity prevention
2.                              Embedding atrocity prevention in the work of UK posts
3.                              The interaction of atrocity prevention with other UK policies and areas of work
4.                              The role of the FCDO in convening cross-government work on atrocity prevention

The UK’s promotion of thematic and country-specific atrocity prevention work at the UN is commendable. It is a longstanding supporter of R2P, provides funding to the UN Office on Genocide Prevention and R2P, and is a member of the Group of Friends in New York and Geneva, the Focal Points network, and the International Atrocity Prevention Working Group.

However, broader UK atrocity prevention policy is characterised by a failure to embed ‘atrocity sensitivity’ across wider bilateral and multilateral work, and by an ongoing conflation of atrocity prevention with conflict prevention. This leads to disjointed and reactive policy that fails to make best use of the UK’s early warning, development, diplomatic, and defence tools.

These problems should be addressed through a whole-of-government UK atrocity prevention strategy, and a reformed institutional set-up for atrocity prevention housed within the FCDO, in order to enhance the coherence, coordination, and effectiveness of UK policy.

Biography

Ben Willis is an Associate Lecturer in Politics and International Relations with the School of Society and Culture at the University of Plymouth and a PhD researcher with the European Centre for the Responsibility to Protect at the University of Leeds. He has previously worked in the atrocity prevention sector with Protection Approaches. He has co-authored various policy papers on the UK approach to preventing mass atrocities and submitted related written evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee. The following is submitted in a personal capacity.

1. The role of UK aid programmes in atrocity prevention

1.1.  The prevention of mass atrocities requires both addressing underlying risk factors and building sources of resilience to help societies withstand the threat of violence. The weakness of state structures, pervasive economic and political instability, and other forms of social and institutional fragility are widely recognised as serious development challenges. But they are also among the common risk factors for mass atrocities (genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity).[1]

1.2.  The UK’s development work in fragile and conflict-affected states therefore performs a vital role in contributing to the long-term structural prevention of atrocities – not only through preventing conflict, but through broader work in promoting human rights, the rule of law, good governance, and inclusive societies, addressing socio-economic inequalities, building state capacity, strengthening civil society, and supporting peacebuilding and transitional justice in countries recovering from past atrocities.[2]

1.3.  UK development work also the potential to contribute substantially to more direct short-term prevention and response, whether through flagging up early warning signs of potential or imminent violence, assisting with the de-escalation or mitigation of crises, providing support and protection to communities at risk, or documenting atrocities to deter perpetrators and assist with later transitional justice work.[3]

1.4.  Atrocity sensitivity: Although existing UK work is extremely valuable, the contribution that it makes to preventing mass atrocities is almost entirely indirect. It does not appear to be the product of considered thinking about atrocity prevention as a distinct issue. The publication of the FCO’s 2019 policy paper on the UK’s approach was an extremely welcome step, but it was largely of restatement of existing practice on related issue areas, and atrocity prevention is still not a clearly defined and operationalised policy that cuts across UK development, diplomatic, and defence work – unlike related UK policies such as WPS and PSVI.[4]

1.5.  There is also an absence of evidence that any lighter form of ‘atrocity sensitivity’ has been embedded into existing FCDO workstreams. The UK routinely applies a ‘conflict sensitivity’ assessment across its foreign policy work, but there is no equivalent understanding of work conducted in an environment where there is a serious risk of mass atrocities, distinct from the risk of conflict, how UK work might interact with those risks, and of the need for a deliberate and systematic approach to minimise the negative effects and maximise the positive effects of that work on the risk of atrocities.[5]

1.6.  An obvious case in point is UK policy on Myanmar. Previous inquiries by the International Development Committee and Foreign Affairs Committee in 2017-18 variously criticised the government’s misplaced focus on democracy promotion in the years leading up to the onset of the genocide against the Rohingya, and highlighted the need for DFID and the FCO to “reflect on how to establish a more proactive approach to atrocity awareness and prevention”[6] and “learn lessons from the recent events […] about responding to signs and prioritising atrocity prevention in political and diplomatic conversations”[7]. However, even the updated Country Development Diagnostic subsequently produced by DFID Myanmar in January 2019 – which includes substantial consideration of conflict issues, based partly on a 2018 JACS assessment – still provided no explicit reference to atrocity prevention concerns.[8]

1.7.  Building Stability Framework: The same is true of other diagnostic tools used in UK development work. It is striking that the government’s own policy paper on preventing atrocities, and all other related statements, make no reference whatsoever to the BSF, considering the value this offers in its practical guidance to development staff for designing strategies and programmes. If its lack of mention as an atrocity prevention tool is surprising, however, the lack of incorporation of atrocity sensitivity within the BSF is entirely unsurprising (atrocity prevention as a general concern is not even mentioned in passing as one of the “wider range of policy aims related to the causes and consequences of conflict” that the BSF contributes towards).[9]

1.8.  Conflict, Stability and Security Fund: As the inquiry notes, the CSSF is considered to be a key programmatic tool within the UK’s atrocity prevention toolkit. However, as the government has itself admitted, CSSF activities are “not always explicitly labelled” as atrocity prevention work.[10] This is something of an understatement – there is no evidence that atrocity sensitivity has been integrated into programme design or delivery across any of its regional or thematic portfolios. The only explicitly labelled work is via the multilateral ‘Championing our Values’ programme that provides funding to the UN Office on Genocide Prevention and R2P.

2. Embedding atrocity prevention in the work of UK posts

2.1.  CRI and JACS risk assessment: The government routinely identifies the annual Cabinet Office-led Countries at Risk of Instability report and the cross-government Joint Analysis of Conflict and Stability as two of its main early warning instruments. However, existing CRI and JACS risk assessment tools are limited in their effectiveness. The Committee may want to consider two issues here – how these tools incorporate atrocity-specific risk indicators, and how useful they might be for staff in UK posts when thinking about medium term risk assessment and programming work.

2.2.  The CRI methodology is classified and does not allow for external scrutiny of its risk modelling, beyond confirmation that its assessment of instability is based on two main factors: the strains placed on a country (pressure) and its capacity to manage those strains (resilience). However, the FCDO has long claimed that the CRI uses “indicators that highlight a higher risk of mass atrocities occurring”.[11] Unfortunately, this again appears to be a misleading claim, as the Cabinet Office has stated that the CRI does not explicitly assess the likelihood of instability factors leading to mass atrocities.[12]

2.3.  The JACS has recently been updated to incorporate atrocity-specific risk indicators, although a public version of the updated guidance note has yet to be released and it would therefore be premature to comment on this. However, while the inclusion of atrocity sensitivity in the JACS is an extremely welcome development, it does not address the further problem that assessments are commissioned on a relatively ad hoc basis. There was no JACS produced on Myanmar, for example, until 2018, and it is unclear whether a JACS has yet been produced on Xinjiang.

2.4.  Early warning mechanisms: Given that the CRI and JACS are focused on longer-term risk assessment, it may be beneficial to develop an additional short-term atrocity early warning tool. There is currently no equivalent to the quarterly CRI trackers that were discontinued in early 2017, or the ‘fast turn-around’ Instability Alerts discontinued in late 2015. The FCDO has claimed that its weekly Stability Monitor is part of its atrocity early warning toolkit, but it is unclear how this is used by staff.[13]

2.5.  Any new early warning tool of this type should be a relatively ‘light touch’ exercise aimed at short to immediate-term horizon scanning and contingency planning. There is also a related need to develop standard reporting and emergency alert channels that would enable mission staff to communicate their concerns about atrocity risks with colleagues in Whitehall, update short, medium, and long-term risk assessment, flag up immediate concerns, and feed into programme and policy response planning.[14]

2.6.  Staff training: The Committee may also want to recommend that existing FCDO atrocity prevention training should be strengthened. The government claimed in response to recent IDC and FAC[15] inquiries that it now offers dedicated atrocity prevention training to all staff. However, the practitioner level ‘Atrocity Response’ module run by the Diplomatic Academy does not address prevention issues – such as identifying risk factors and early warning signs or developing programming and policy responses – and instead addresses investigative, criminal prosecution, and transitional justice measures.[16] The training is also entirely voluntary for staff in at-risk countries. A related practitioner level ‘Conflict’ module has also been described as offering “some training on atrocity prevention” but this contains no more than a brief sub-section outlining the basics of R2P and its implementation through the UN. [17]

2.7.  Staff toolkit: The Committee may also want to re-iterate the recent Foreign Affairs Committee’s recommendation that the government should develop an Atrocity Prevention Toolkit similar to those produced by the FCO for FoRB, WPS, and other UK policy areas.[18] This would provide practical day-to-day guidance to UK posts and desks and help to inform their work across the prevention spectrum (it’s also worth noting here the ‘Field Guide on Helping Prevent Mass Atrocities’ that USAID provides to overseas staff and the ‘Responsibility to Protect: Atrocity Prevention Toolkit’ developed by the European External Action Service).[19]

3. The interaction of atrocity prevention with other UK policies and areas of work

3.1.  Broadly speaking, UK atrocity prevention policy does not interact with other policies. It does not have the same established status as the WPS, PSVI, and PoC agendas (all of which provide an extremely valuable, albeit indirect, contribution to UK atrocity prevention work) and there is little evidence that atrocity prevention has been developed as a comparable thematic policy that similarly cuts across UK early warning, development, diplomatic, and defence work. There is no evidence that atrocity sensitivity has been embedded in even limited form, even though the government has claimed repeatedly that atrocity prevention is “well-established within existing geographical and thematic workstreams”.[20] As such, the Committee may want to request precise details on how atrocity prevention policy has been explicitly incorporated into relevant FCDO workstreams.

3.2.  The need for a national strategy: The UK approach to preventing mass atrocities has evolved organically and there is a need for the government to take stock and address the inherent limitations in this approach by developing a comprehensive whole-of-government atrocity prevention strategy. As has been widely noted, existing UK policy relies on an outdated understanding of what mass atrocity prevention entails – conflating the prevention of atrocities with the prevention of armed conflict, and uncritically subsuming the former within the latter. This has two knock-on effects. It means that the UK appears to believe that it can work to prevent atrocities simply by working to preventing conflict, and that atrocities which occur outside of the context of armed conflict are sufficiently uncommon as to not require (or, less generously, not deserve) overt consideration in UK policy.

3.3.  The government defends its position in part by arguing that “the tools to prevent and respond to both atrocity situations and armed conflict are substantively alike”. This is partly true. There is substantial overlap when it comes to addressing long-term structural risk factors. However, although conflict prevention and atrocity prevention tools are often alike, they are not identical – and how they should be used differs considerably, depending on their purpose. Conflict prevention is a largely impartial activity and aimed at convincing multiple parties to a dispute to refrain from fighting as a matter of mutual self-interest, whereas atrocity prevention is inherently partial and aimed at deterring or preventing perpetrators from committing atrocities against victims. Conflict prevention tools can therefore be entirely ineffective, or even counterproductive, when the aim is (or should be) to prevent atrocities.[21]

3.4.  The government’s position also neglects that its limited toolkit is entirely inappropriate to situations that do not require conflict prevention measures, where it is peacetime human rights abuses – rather than conflict risks – that metastasise into atrocity crimes.[22] It seems apparent that the UK has also not integrated atrocity prevention into its human rights work and does not have a coherent and coordinated approach to the substantial proportion of atrocities that occur in peacetime.[23] This is despite recent government claims that it is “committed to atrocity prevention in all contexts”.[24]

3.5.  The situation in Xinjiang has brought this aspect of UK policy into especially sharp relief, but there are any number of recent examples. A singular focus on conflict-related atrocities excludes not only systematic repression in Venezuela, Burundi, Eritrea, and North Korea, for example, but also the gradual unfolding of the genocidal persecution of the Rohingya over the last decade. It also obscures the outbreak of one-sided regime violence against civilians in Libya and Syria in 2011, prior to the onset of armed conflict – indicative of a further concern with the UK’s approach, its assumption that armed conflict leads to atrocities, when the reverse can be true, and atrocity prevention can instead contribute to conflict prevention, rather than vice versa.

3.6.  The UK government is not alone, however, in labouring under the misconception that atrocity prevention is entirely synonymous with conflict prevention – a key lesson learned of the last two decades. Former UN Special Advisor on R2P, Professor Edward Luck, considered this to be the “mother of all muddles” affecting the UN’s ability to prevent mass atrocities.[25] The annual reports of successive UN Special Advisors over the last decade have repeatedly sought to emphasise that the two agendas are “closely related [but] not synonymous”, that prevention measures “should be developed with that in mind”[26], and that “despite the obvious interlinkages between the conflict and atrocity prevention agendas, the latter should not be subsumed by the former”.[27]

3.7.  Objections to a strategy: Frequent recommendations to develop a UK strategy have nonetheless been rejected since 2018 – most recently in late November[28] – and the Committee may therefore want to pre-emptively engage with the government’s line of reasoning. Its response to the Foreign Affairs Committee in November 2018 is instructive here. The government expressed concern that developing a strategy “risks considerable duplication and diverting resources away from delivering existing atrocity prevention work”. It disagreed that “the simple existence of a ‘strategy’ necessarily improves delivery”. And it argued for the need to “be realistic" that “the UK alone will rarely have the ability to prevent atrocities”.[29]

3.8.  The first two grounds rely on the outdated misconception that atrocity prevention is not and should not be conceptually or operationally distinct from conflict prevention (even without adopting a strategy, this problem still needs to be addressed). All three grounds also speak to issues of prioritisation and political will. This hinges in part on how the government views the cost-benefit question of whether investing in long term prevention is a net positive, as opposed to maintaining its more reactive, and ultimately costly, ad hoc policy. And there is the simple question of whether the government wants to do more, within the constraints of limited resources and other policy priorities.

3.9.  Aside from resolving the conceptual problems inherent to the UK’s existing approach, a strategy would clarify the ‘ways and means’ through which to achieve already declared policy ‘ends’. It would be more likely to reduce the duplication of effort and expenditure of resources that result from its current disjointed approach and would properly embed atrocity sensitivity into UK early warning, development, programmatic, and diplomatic work. The FCDO’s 2019 policy paper is a vague statement of intent and practice in this regard, and a more comprehensive atrocity prevention strategy could follow the laudable example of successive UK National Action Plans on Women, Peace and Security[30] by setting out measurable strategic objectives and performance indicators, ensuring systematic internal evaluation of UK prevention work, and committing to both annual reporting to Parliament and regular consultation with the UK Civil Society Atrocity Prevention Working Group.

4. The role of the FCDO in convening cross-government work on atrocity prevention

4.1.  Ministerial responsibility: Existing institutional arrangements as set out in the government’s 2019 policy paper appear to have been in flux since the FCO-DFID merger, and the Committee may want to clarify ministerial lines of responsibility. Lord Ahmad has apparently retained the ministerial portfolio for atrocity prevention, which presumably still falls under his broader responsibility for ‘multilateral engagement’ – again, reflective of the government’s view that atrocity prevention is primarily a multilateral UN-based activity, rather than a thematic issue embedded across the full range of its bilateral and multilateral foreign policy activities.

4.2.  It is arguable (although not necessarily preferable) that atrocity prevention should now fall under the ‘conflict, stabilisation and mediation’ portfolio, held by Vicky Ford MP, on the basis that the government itself considers atrocity prevention to be part of its conflict prevention work. The new Conflict, Stabilisation, and Mediation Directorate also appears to be the home of the Conflict Centre that the government has claimed will “support a more integrated HMG approach to conflict prevention, management and resolution” and will “include working with teams across FCDO and HMG to support the wide range of interconnected agendas aimed at building inclusive and stable environments and preventing possible atrocities” (emphasis added).[31]

4.3.  FCDO leads: The Committee may also want to request further information on the activities of the senior official responsible for atrocity prevention and the Focal Point on R2P. Both roles were previously occupied by the head of the Multilateral Policy Directorate, and the head of the reformed Multilateral, Sanctions, and Strategic Engagement Directorate is now the responsible senior official. However, the Focal Point role is apparently yet to be allocated.[32] There is no public information about the work of the senior official since the role was first announced in 2019. Successive Focal Points since 2014 have meanwhile occupied a largely outward-facing role that “engages at international level with like-minded partners” – again, a reflection of their position within the Multilateral Policy Directorate – rather than monitoring and convening FCDO and wider cross-government work on atrocity prevention.[33]

4.4.  Thematic team: It is also unclear how many FCDO staff currently work on atrocity prevention as a distinct policy area. Director of Open Societies and Human Rights, Paul Williams, suggested in oral evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee in April 2021 that there was only a single central desk officer focused on the issue.[34] More recently, FCDO Minister Amanda Milling was unable to provide Sarah Champion with “a total number of staff working on atrocity prevention” and implied that there is no thematic team working on atrocity prevention – in contrast to the various thematic teams working on WPS, PSVI, FoRB, and other UK policy areas.[35]

4.5.  Institutional set-up: Existing institutional arrangements for UK atrocity prevention work appear to be very limited in scope and function, and the government should commit to a reformed institutional set-up for cross-government atrocity prevention work. This could be achieved through the establishment of a Joint Unit for atrocity prevention housed within the FCDO, or a cross-Whitehall steering group and lower-level working group arrangement (similar to the current WPS set-up). These are only examples, and institutional reforms should be worked through as part of the process of developing an overarching strategy.

4.6.  Given that atrocity prevention cuts across the work of the newly established Multilateral, Sanctions and Strategic Engagement Directorate, the Conflict, Stabilisation, and Mediation Directorate, and the Open Societies and Human Rights Directorate, as well as relevant geographical directorates, any new institutional arrangement needs to reflect the cross-directorate nature of FCDO atrocity prevention work. It also needs to regularly convene with, and draw on policy expertise from, other government departments, including the MOD, National Security Secretariat, Joint Intelligence Office, Home Office, Ministry of Justice, and Treasury.

4.7.  The overall purpose of any new institutional set-up is that an appropriately resourced mechanism would ensure ownership of strategy and drive its implementation, addressing duplication and co-ordination problems within the FCDO and between government departments, developing and consolidating cross-departmental expertise, and enabling a more joined-up whole-of-government approach that embeds atrocity sensitivity across UK early warning, development, defence, and diplomatic work.

January 2022

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