Consolidating peace in Lebanon from a human rights perspective : focus on the political and security partnership of the Barcelona Declaration

Abstract

On an international scale human rights today are proving to be, more so, an indispensable requirement for peace building and conflict prevention. As the experience of post-war Lebanon tends to demonstrate so far, peace founded on persisting violations of human rights will not be a viable one, but rather, a "suspension of hostilities, not peace" along the lines of Immanuel Kant. For genuine prosperity, security, and peace to materialize in a post-conflict order, human rights protections should be aptly instituted, for simply without them peace cannot be truly achieved or has no relevant content. By the same token, the 1995 Barcelona Declaration reflects the EU's (European Union) increasing awareness of the impact of human rights on regional peace and stability whereby the parties involved "expressed their conviction that the peace, stability and security of the Mediterranean region are a common asset which they pledge to promote and consolidate by all means at their disposal." Nowhere in the Declaration is this assertion more explicit than in the Political and Security Partnership (PSP), which constitutes the first basket or chapter of the Barcelona Declaration and to which Lebanon adheres. By adopting a comparative approach between what the PSP stipulates and what the reality on the ground in Lebanon reveals, my interest was to examine the PSP's feasibility in consolidating the Lebanon quasi-peace. But as my analysis have shown, the task proved intricate, if not elusive, since the partnership was plagued with a series of domestic (internal) and regional (external) shortcomings that inevitably impacted on its effective applicability in Lebanon and the region as a whole. Domestically, Lebanon's 'captive nation' status with respect to Syria left little room, if any, for the partnership to fare properly. Whereas regionally, the PSP was subject to the crushing weight of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East thereby bringing it to a stall. Consequently, the subject of Lebanon was lost on the EU agenda and the partnership at hand remained much of a process, but without progress. My primary concern then was to refocus EU attention on the plight of Syrian-occupied Lebanon and explore through suggested prospects what the EU, which has a strong human rights component governing its Euro-Mediterranean relations, could be doing to redress the PSP's domestic and regional shortcomings thereupon consolidating peace and stability in Lebanon and the region at large.