Burma is legally obliged to allow international aid

By Peter Hulsroj

When natural disaster strikes governments are mostly overwhelmed. This was true even in the US with Hurricane Katrina and it is true today in Burma. Lots of assistance was given to New Orleans by foreign nations and aid organisations, and it was all accepted apart from a polemical offer of help from Cuba. Yet in Burma, as so many times before, we experience a totalitarian regime that dithers about receiving aid for its own perverse reasons. Well-meaning people around the globe are aghast, but almost all seem to think that it is the sovereign right of Burma to refuse aid. This is hogwash.

The law of human rights speaks clearly to this, when properly understood, and even if law will not on its own prevent the Burmese regime from brutalising its population by intransigence, law is part of the aid equation - important not in its own right but important in underwriting a moral imperative. Leaders must know that if they cannot take care of their populations on their own then there is no moral or legal choice, but to let others assist.

In very simple terms the International Bill of Rights, that is, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, mandates that governments ensure that the human beings entrusted to them will have adequate food, shelter and medical care, and that governments do so by deploying all means at their disposal.

When national means are inadequate, but adequate means are available internationally, it follows with inescapable logic that the government of a stricken nation is legally obliged to allow international aid.

If it does not, it is in breach of its human rights obligations. This is true even for Burma, which remarkably did not ratify either of the two international covenants, because the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on its own leads to this result, as an expression of binding customary law.

At this time, neglecting to provide for a stricken population by refusing foreign aid is perhaps not an international crime, yet for the international community to realise that law speaks with a clear voice in defence of the defenceless in these cases is the first step towards an altered mindset and towards internationally criminalising such avoidable misery!

Peter Hulsroj,
Legal Adviser,
Vienna, Austria

Source: FT