Recommendations on the Provision of Collective Humanitarian Assistance in Response to Emerging Crises in the Territory of the CSTO Member States

At all times, all hostilities have been accompanied by tragedies and have led to suffering wherever they unfold.
Today, unprecedented development and improvement of weapons and their massive use against infrastructure (often critical infrastructure ensuring vital activities of the population in vast areas), increasingly often leads to humanitarian disasters.
In recent decades, the term “humanitarian” has started to be used in relation to the civilian population, i.e. people not directly involved in a conflict, but who are suffering from its flare-up or consequences or whose daily life is disrupted and whose very livelihoods are in danger.
The Recommendations on the Provision of Collective Humanitarian Assistance in Response to Emerging Crises in the Territory of the Collective Security Treaty Organization Member States (hereinafter referred to as the Recommendations) were adopted at the plenary session of the CSTO Parliamentary Assembly on November 5, 2019 in Yerevan.
In accordance with the Resolution signed by Vyacheslav Volodin, Chairman of the CSTO Parliamentary Assembly, the Recommendations were sent to the parliaments of the CSTO Member States to be used in lawmaking activities.
The document gives legal reasoning to the definition of a humanitarian disaster: a state of a society, characterized by the threat of death of a large number of people due to the factors that make this threat real. Such factors include lack of shelter from adverse weather conditions, lack of water and food, spread of diseases, forced displacement and a number of other factors.
The document accompanying the Recommendations notes that regulation of humanitarian assistance within the Organization is sufficiently developed, in particular, in the Recommendations on Harmonization of Legislation of the CSTO Member States in the Field of Humanitarian Assistance adopted on November 26, 2015. They address such concepts as:
– humanitarian emergency response;
– humanitarian crisis;
– humanitarian assistance;
– humanitarian operation.
The document considers humanitarian aid as material aid aimed at meeting people’s basic needs for water, food, medication and basic necessities. However, the return to normal life does not end here.
First aid must be followed by a phase that enables society to return to a level that is equal or close to the pre-crisis one. Humanitarian assistance, therefore, is a long-term and multifaceted process of rendering help in the cultural, educational and other humanitarian fields, enabling the affected population of a given territory to restore a standard of living equal or close to the pre-crisis one.
The Recommendations on the Provision of Collective Humanitarian Assistance in Response to Emerging Crises in the Territory of the Collective Security Treaty Organization Member States include basic principles and critical areas of collective humanitarian assistance; management and financing of collective humanitarian assistance; international legal framework for collective humanitarian assistance.
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