About the
Responsibility to Protect: A Primer
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Why do we need
the responsibility to protect?
The responsibility to protect is a principle which
seeks to ensure that the international community never again fails to
act in the face of genocide and other gross forms of human rights
abuse. “R2P,” as it is commonly abbreviated, was
adopted by heads of state and government at the World Summit in 2005
sitting as the United Nations General Assembly. The principle
stipulates, first, that states have an obligation to protect their
citizens from mass atrocities; second, that the international community
should assist them in doing so; and, third, that, if the state in
question fails to act appropriately, the responsibility to do so falls
to that larger community of states. R2P should be understood as a
solemn promise made by leaders of every country to all men and women
endangered by mass atrocities.
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What forms of abuse does R2P seek to
address?
The UN’s 2005 World Summit
Outcome Document explicitly limits the application of the
norm to four types of mass atrocities: genocide, ethnic cleansing, war
crimes and crimes against humanity. Save for ethnic cleansing, an abuse
only recently understood as an atrocity crime, these terms have been
clearly and comprehensively defined in a range of documents, including
the founding statute of the International Criminal Court. R2P does not
apply to many grave threats to human security, whether from climate
change or disease, or from many harmful or even ruinous state policies,
such as the suspension of civil liberties, mass corruption, or coups
d’état. Other human rights instruments, legal
frameworks and institutions are better suited to address these pressing
issues.
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How will R2P work?
At the very heart of this new norm is the
principle that states, with the aid of the international community,
must act to prevent mass atrocities. Equally central is the idea that
concerned outsiders should help states prevent these gross abuses
through what the UN document characterizes as “diplomatic,
humanitarian and other peaceful means.” This could include
strengthening state capacity through economic assistance, rule-of-law
reform, the building of political institutions, and the like; or, when
violence has begun or seems imminent, through direct acts of mediation.
The intense diplomatic engagement following the disputed election in
Kenya, or the work of neighbors and of the UN to support the government
of Burundi, both demonstrate the imperative of cooperative efforts to
prevent atrocities.
Only when such means have been unsuccessful should
the international community, acting through the Security Council, turn
to more coercive measures. These could include such non-consensual
measures as economic sanctions or the threat of sanctions, arms
embargoes, or the threat to refer perpetrators to international
criminal prosecution. Should peaceful means be inadequate and the state
is manifestly failing to protect its population, then—and
only then—would the Security Council consider the use of
military force.
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How did R2P come about?
This new principle has many sources: the rise of
international humanitarian law starting with the Geneva Conventions in
the late nineteenth century and accelerating in the period after World
War II; the growing willingness of the UN Security Council, since the
end of the Cold War, to authorize forceful and sometimes coercive
actions inside refractory or weak states; and the profound sense of
revulsion at the failure of the international community to act
effectively in Somalia, Rwanda, and Bosnia. The need for a broadly
accepted new norm to guide the international response to atrocities
became manifest in 1999 with the NATO bombing to end ethnic cleansing
in Kosovo, which began after the issue had been deadlocked in the
Security Council: even many who considered the intervention morally
legitimate were troubled by its illegality under international law.
Throughout the 1990s, the United Nations was
deeply divided between those who insisted on a “right of
humanitarian intervention” and those who viewed such a
doctrine as an indefensible infringement of state sovereignty. At the
time, Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned that the UN risked
discrediting itself if it failed to respond to catastrophes such as
Rwanda and Srebrenica, and he challenged member states to agree on a
framework for action. The 2001 report of the International Commission
on Intervention and State Sovereignty formulated the alternative
principle of “the responsibility to protect,”
focusing not on the “right” of outsiders to
intervene but on the responsibility of all states to protect people at
risk. The High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change endorsed
the concept as did the Secretary-General, and then heads of state and
government gathered in the General Assembly for the UN’s
sixtieth anniversary voted unanimously to accept a
“responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war
crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity” in the World
Summit Outcome Document.
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How does R2P affect the idea of
sovereignty?
States have long accepted limits on their conduct,
whether towards their own citizens or others. The UN Universal
Declaration of Human Rights requires that states protect individual and
social rights; the Geneva Conventions and various treaties and
covenants prohibiting torture, trafficking in persons, or nuclear
proliferation similarly restrict the right of states to behave as they
wish. At the same time, there has been a shift in the understanding of
sovereignty, spurred both by a growing sensitivity to human rights and
by a reaction to atrocities perpetrated upon citizens by their own
leaders. Sovereignty is increasingly defined, not as a license to
control those within one’s borders, but rather as a set of
obligations towards citizens. Kofi Annan spoke of the sovereignty of
the individual as well as of the state. Francis Deng, the Special
Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the former representative of
the Secretary-General on internally displaced persons, developed the
concept of “sovereignty as responsibility.” And
chief among
those responsibilities, he and others argued, is the responsibility to
protect citizens from the most atrocious forms of abuse. Simply put,
people come first.
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When should military force be
considered?
A timely intervention could have stopped, if not
prevented, the genocidal horror in Rwanda, and perhaps also in Cambodia
and elsewhere. But in many other cases where the level of abuse reaches
the R2P threshold, the most effective response is far less clear. The
ICISS report and the Secretary-General’s In Larger Freedom
proposed five “precautionary principles” or
“criteria
of legitimacy” to help guide such decisions: the violence in
question must include large-scale actual or threatened loss of life or
ethnic cleansing; the purpose of the intervention must be to prevent or
halt suffering; military force must be the last resort; the means must
be commensurate with the ends sought; and the intervention must have a
reasonable prospect of success. Governments did not agree to include
precautionary principles in the World Summit Outcome Document. Thus, no
formally accepted principles—not even voluntary
ones—
presently exist to guide Security Council decision making. These
standards can and should, however, continue to inform public debate and
deliberations among governments.
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Where do we go from here?
There are three major challenges in moving R2P
from
theory to practice. The first is conceptual – to ensure that
the
scope, and limits, of the norm as it has evolved are well understood in
all parts of the world, so that misunderstandings (for example that R2P
is only about military intervention) do not persist, and that as new
situations arise requiring preventive or reactive action by the
international community, there will be broad consensus about what to do.
The second is institutional, to ensure that
governments
and intergovernmental organizations have available all the diplomatic,
civilian and, as necessary, military capability needed to ensure
effective early warning and early action, to provide essential
assistance to those countries who need and want it—and most
importantly, to people desperately in need of protection.
The third, as always, is political: to ensure that
when
mass atrocities next occur, the necessary commitment will be there from
the decision-makers that matter. This means having arrangements in
place for effective mobilization by both governments and civil society.
Crises threatening large-scale loss of life are
bound to
continue to arise, and with them debates over issues such as the most
appropriate response to the killing of civilians in Darfur, Cyclone
Nargis in Myanmar, and to the violence surrounding the elections in
Zimbabwe. The international community of states will encounter
extremely difficult and painful questions about the applicability of
R2P, which only demonstrates the need for clarity over the reach and
limits of this new principle. The attempt to forge political consensus
in any given case will depend in part on reaching agreement over
exactly what it was that the states agreed to do when they adopted R2P
in 2005. But it will depend as well on an evolution of public
sentiment. Leaders will take real risks only if citizens demand it; and
publics have only recently begun to demand that their leaders confront
the issue of human rights violations abroad. As the clamor grows, so
will the likelihood of action.
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