The United Nations should heed calls from protesters in Myanmar to invoke Responsibility to Protect, but that will not and should not include military intervention, a top international legal expert has said.

Chris Sidoti, a former member of an independent UN fact-finding mission on Myanmar, said the doctrine, also known as R2P, should be used to support actions against the Myanmar military such as a global arms embargo, targeted sanctions, and rights monitoring missions.

But he cautioned against a belief, expressed by some since the military seized power on February 1, that invoking R2P could mean some form of military intervention to protect people, including unarmed protesters from being gunned down by police and soldiers. 

“Are the people calling for R2P wanting military intervention? If so, they are bound to be deeply disappointed,” Sidoti told Myanmar Now. “It won’t happen. It didn’t happen in 2017 to protect... Rohingya being hunted, expelled, raped and killed and I can’t see how a decision would be taken to intervene now.”

“I don’t want to see Myanmar go the way of Afghanistan and Iraq anyway,” he added. 

Sidoti is part of a new three-member Special Advisory Council for Myanmar, an independent body formed to help provide international support to the democractic uprising. 

Its other two members are Yanghee Lee, the former UN Special Rapporteur for Myanmar, and Marzuki Darusman, who chaired the fact-finding mission that Sidoti was a member of. 

R2P was developed in response to mass atrocities committed in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and adopted at the UN World Summit in 2005. 

It was invoked by the UN Security Council to justify controversial NATO-led airstrikes in Libya in 2011, which rights groups said killed scores of civilians and may have involved attacks on non-military targets.  

Many protesters in Myanmar have in recent weeks implored the UN to act, with one popular slogan asking “how many dead bodies” the organisation needed to take action.  

But there has been little co-ordinated messaging from within the movement about what such action would mean in practice, and observers have cautioned that protesters may be wasting time and energy calling for interventions that foreign entities cannot or will not deliver. 

UN officials, along with countries including the US and UK, have vowed that the military will be held accountable for its crimes - but have also failed to outline how that might happen. 

“The illusion of imminent action has many pro-democracy protesters believing substantive intervention might be forthcoming. Banners at recent demonstrations have indeed implored the US, EU and others to step in, including through armed invasion,” analyst Gabrielle Aron and journalist Francis Wade wrote in The Guardian recently. 

“A coalition of civil society groups in Myanmar has called on the UN security council to send an intervention mission,” they added. “Perhaps some are making such appeals tactically, to generate wider global attention. But for others there remains an unjustified faith in western power, one that misses a hard truth of liberal posturing: that rhetoric, properly amplified, is a neat cover for inaction.”

Sidoti said that invoking R2P would be “largely symbolic rather than practical” and that sanctions, embargoes and monitoring exercises are all actions that could be taken without appealing to the doctrine.   

“Nonetheless, R2P does raise all those other possible actions... so invoking it could still be very useful and effective.” he said. “Just don’t expect to see blue helmets or green helmets or any other foreign helmets on the streets of Yangon any time soon.”