Countries providing resources to humanitarian organizations also have responsibilities as states parties to the Geneva Conventions – for ensuring that the operating environments for humanitarian organizations in war-torn countries allow them to comply with the rules regulating relief operations. However, there is a risk of tension between these different responsibilities.
As ‘High Contracting Parties’ to the Geneva Conventions, states have accepted responsibility under Common Article 1 for ensuring respect for IHL. They are also responsible for promoting the implementation of Security Council resolutions, both thematic ones, such as those on the protection of civilians in armed conflict, and country-specific political and peacekeeping resolutions, for ensuring that the operating environment for humanitarian organizations is conducive to effective operations. All member states also have joint responsibility for oversight of UN humanitarian operations through the secretary-general’s annual report to the GA subsidiary body, the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC).
In addition, states that contribute to appeals for humanitarian funding may attach conditions to their contributions that either facilitate or render more difficult the tasks of humanitarian organizations.
These observations pose the question: Are there ways in which states, other than those party to armed conflicts, could better coordinate their responses, both internally among their concerned ministries – such as defence, foreign affairs, aid and trade – and with other states, so that humanitarian organizations could more readily conduct their operations in accordance with the principles and achieve better outcomes for affected communities?
States responding to violations of IHL
In their report, Humanitarian access in armed conflict: A need for new principles?, Adele Harmer, Abby Stoddard and Alexandra Sarazen write:
This highlights the problem, long acknowledged among humanitarian organizations, that states frequently use their financial contributions to humanitarian organizations as an alternative to taking robust action to bring a conflict to an end and prevent violations of international law. Such failures of political and legal action encourage parties to armed conflicts to ignore their own responsibilities towards their populations, thereby stimulating a cycle of non-observance of responsibilities by all actors and making it ever more difficult for humanitarian organizations to operate in accordance with the principles.
Common Article 1 of 1949 Geneva Conventions
Article 1 common to the four Geneva Conventions, known as Common Article 1, stipulates that ‘the High Contracting Parties undertake to respect and to ensure respect for the present Convention in all circumstances.’ In other words, whether or not states are a party to an armed conflict, they have accepted responsibility not only to comply with IHL themselves but also to ‘do everything reasonably in their power to ensure that the provisions are respected’ by parties to armed conflict. The obligations flowing from Common Article 1 are key to promoting compliance with IHL.
The failure of the UN Security Council and of individual states to take seriously their responsibilities under Common Article 1 has contributed to the continuing violations of humanitarian principles by belligerents in conflicts around the world.
It should be noted that the consensus in the UN Security Council, already fragile and limited in its impact, began to break down in 2007 when the Russian Federation opposed UN action in Kosovo, and was fatally compromised by the authorization to use force for the protection of civilians in Libya in 2011. In addition, it must be recognized that the majority of the permanent members of the Security Council are active, directly or indirectly, as parties to some of the most serious current conflicts and have not hesitated to use their veto power to prevent action to bring perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity to account.
States as donors
In 2020, four donors – the US, European Commission, UK and Germany – contributed more than 70 per cent of global humanitarian aid.
Corinne Redfern’s article, ‘One year on, Ukraine exposes the limits of well-funded international aid’, describes how local organizations are struggling to access funding while pressing needs are going unmet. The scale of the devastation is immense, but rigid funding conditions, unrealistic deadlines, and a focus on statistical targets is pushing some NGOs to prioritize faster, less impactful activities, even in a country where some $17 billion has been made available.
This example highlights some of the most frequent obstacles facing humanitarian organizations in their efforts to operate in accordance with the principle of impartiality. It illustrates donor preferences for data over impact and highlights the disconnect between the mechanics of satisfying donor conditions and the achievement of the outcomes that reflect the priorities of civilian populations.
Since the Grand Bargain agreement at the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016, intensive efforts have brought together donor state representatives, the UN, parts of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and NGO officials in various workstreams tasked with making programmes more effective and less bureaucratic. While progress has been made on some issues, the release of the updated Grand Bargain 2.0 in June 2022 revealed that little has changed in terms of increasing the levels of aid channelled through organizations to stimulate greater local ownership, which is expected to lead to better outcomes for affected communities.
It is incumbent on major donors, particularly the four donors that contributed more than 70 per cent of humanitarian funding in 2020, to harmonize and streamline the conditions they impose on the use of their funding. In recognition of the fact that the leadership of humanitarian action in armed conflict contexts is dispersed among different UN, Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, and international and local NGO bodies, it is the responsibility of funding states to ‘speak with one voice’ when interacting with these actors. Coordination among donor states themselves may be even more important than coordination among humanitarian organizations.
Existing bodies in which donor states meet, such as the Good Humanitarian Donorship (GHD) initiative and the OCHA Donor Support Group, have not taken up the challenge of ‘speaking with one voice’ to their partners in the UN, Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, and NGO bodies or used their collective political power in support of humanitarian action.
Existing bodies in which donor states meet have not taken up the challenge of ‘speaking with one voice’ to their partners in the UN, Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, and NGO bodies.
Discussions during the Sanguine Mirage project cycle suggested that the GHD initiative as a platform has the best potential for addressing these issues.
The GHD initiative was launched in 2003 by a group of donor states with the aim of promoting best practices in humanitarian assistance and increasing the quality and quantity of aid provided to people affected by crises. With 42 donor members it has now become the most comprehensive common donor platform. The initiative is based on four core principles: (i) providing humanitarian aid in a timely and flexible manner; (ii) strengthening local capacities and involvement; (iii) enhancing coherence among humanitarian actors; and (iv) promoting continuous learning and improvement. These elements are elaborated into 24 principles and good practices of humanitarian donorship, which provide both a framework to guide official humanitarian aid and a mechanism for encouraging greater donor accountability.
The GHD platform provides the only overall mechanism for inter-donor coordination, but the elaboration of its principles has become increasingly technical, and its momentum has been weakened by an annual rotation of co-chairs. Attempts by an international NGO, Development Assistance Research Associates (DARA), to assess and rank individual donor government annual performance under these principles were contested by some governments and the review stopped.
Recognizing that donor governments are obliged to respond to domestic pressures, GHD members should now respond to wider perceptions that these factors drive funding decisions more than objective analysis of needs in affected countries.
