The Responsibility to Protect*

MATT DEUTSCHER Canadian High Commission, London W1K 4AB

The decision whether, if ever, to intervene in the affairs of a sovereign state with military force has become a critical issue of the post Cold War era. In 2000 the Canadian government launched the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), which in 2001 published its ndings in The Responsibility to Protect. The Commission found broad support for the notion of sovereignty not only as a right, but also a responsibility, the responsibility of a state to provide protection for its people. The primary responsibility for protecting citizens rests with states. But when states are unable or unwilling to provide this protection, or are themselves the perpetrators of atrocities, the Commission argues that the international community has a responsibility temporarily to step in, forcefully if necessary. The Commission resisted the temptation to identify human rights violations falling short of outright killing or ethnic cleansing. This eliminates the possibility of intervening on the basis of systematic oppression of human rights or intervening to remove a military dictatorship. The intention of the report was to provoke debate; to strengthen the role of the United Nations and ensure that such interventions were multilateral and meeting the wider needs of a region and not the interests of major powers. There is an ongoing need to ensure that the Security Council is effective and that resources match the political will. These debates must continue within a UN framework.
KEYWORDS

Canada Human rights Military intervention Responsibility to Protect State sovereignty United Nations

The Responsibility to Protect is about the right of humanitarian intervention the question of when, if ever, it is appropriate for states to take military action against another state for the purpose of protecting people at risk. Historically, this issue became alive with the end of the Cold War, when the international community was faced with humanitarian tragedies and loss of civilian life in failed states and internal conicts in Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo. The responses by the international community to these were inconsistent, controversial, inadequate or altogether lacking. In the case of Rwanda, the UN Security Council actually reduced the troops available to General Dallaire, the Canadian Force Commander, in the middle of a genocide; and then played war games to avoid triggering the
*Based on a presentation to Medacts AGM and Conference, London, 8 May 2004. MEDICINE, CONFLICT AND SURVIVAL, VOL. 21, NO. 1, 28 34 (2005) ISSN 1362-3699 print/1743-9396 online DOI: 10.1080/1362369042000315041 # 2005 Taylor & Francis Ltd.

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1948 Genocide Convention and its obligation to prevent or stop genocide.1 The international community remained ineffective during the tragic war of Bosnia 199295, helpless to prevent the deaths of over 100,000 Bosnians. This included the tragic killing of over 6,000 Muslim men in the UN safe haven of Srebrenica.2 With these events, it became clear that the international community needed to act when faced with an occurring or inevitable humanitarian tragedy. The issue came to a head in 1999 with the NATO intervention in Kosovo. That autumn UN Secretary-General Ko Annan launched a debate in the General Assembly when he challenged the UN membership to reach consensus on reconciling state sovereignty with the imperative of upholding human rights and humanitarian norms. In particular he asked how the United Nations should respond to human rights and humanitarian crises and the specic means it should employ. A year later, in his report to the Millennium Assembly, he framed the issue as follows:
Few would disagree that both the defence of humanity and the defence of sovereignty are principles that must be supported. Alas, that does not tell us which principle should prevail when they are in conict. Humanitarian Intervention is a sensitive issue, fraught with political difculty and not susceptible to easy answers. But surely no legal principle not even sovereignty can ever shield crimes against humanity.3

It was in direct response to this challenge that Canada, under the leadership of then Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy, launched the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS).4 The Commission was comprised of distinguished practitioners of international relations, drawn from every region of the world and from many disciplines. Northern and Southern perspectives were even reected in the choice of co-chairs: Gareth Evans (former Australian foreign minister) from the North and Mohamed Sahnoun (former Algerian diplomat and Special Representative and Adviser of the UN Secretary-General) from the South. The ICISS was given a one-year mandate to promote comprehensive debate and to foster global political consensus on how to move from paralysis towards international action, particularly through the UN. The built-in diversity of the Commission and the extent and inclusiveness of its consultation makes the consensus it reached on its report, The Responsibility to Protect,5 all the more remarkable and compelling. All 12 members endorsed it; there was no minority opinion. Canada presented the report to Secretary-General Annan in December 2001. So what is so important about the ndings of the ICISS? Why do we feel that it has broken new ground for establishing the principles of humanitarian intervention? For Canada, the way the Commission reframed the debate is of fundamental importance. The issue was re-cast not

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as an argument about the right to intervene but about the responsibility to protect. In doing so, it shifted the focus onto the needs of people at risk, rather than the interests of the interveners. The Commission also found broad support for the notion of sovereignty not only as a right but also as a responsibility, the responsibility of a state to provide protection for its people. This reects an expansion of the denition of sovereignty, from control to responsibility. The primary responsibility for protecting citizens rests with states. But when states are unable or unwilling to provide this protection, or are themselves the perpetrators of atrocities, the Commission argues that the international community has a responsibility temporarily to step in, forcefully if necessary. It should be stressed that the responsibility to protect remains a prosovereignty doctrine. Strong, effective and accountable states are best able to protect their own people. But where weak or failed states cannot or will not act, the responsibility to protect devolves to the international community, temporarily. Importantly, the Commission dened responsibility to protect as having three dimensions: prevention, reaction and rebuilding. While assigning very high priority to prevention efforts, as indeed the UN itself is trying to do, the Commissions mandate was to study the harder edge of intervention, to consider under what circumstances it is warranted, under whose authority it should be conducted, and the modalities for its execution. This is not to demean the value of prevention and re-building, which cannot be under-estimated. However, the ICISS mandate was to discuss the principle of Reaction or Military Intervention the area that is most difcult to arrive at consensus. Military Intervention On military intervention, the Commission summarised the relevant decision-making criteria into six headings: just cause, right intention, last resort, proportional means, reasonable prospects and the right authority. The Just Cause Threshold argues that there are grounds that warrant intervention irrespective of state sovereignty. This includes genocide and large scale ethnic cleansing, whether actual or imminent. The Commission resisted the temptation to identify human rights violations falling short of outright killing or ethnic cleansing. This eliminates the possibility of intervening on the basis of systematic oppression of human rights or intervening to remove a military dictatorship. It is important to note that the report clearly states that military action can be legitimate as an anticipatory measure in response to clear evidence of likely large-scale killing. Without this possibility of anticipatory action, the international community would be placed in the morally untenable position of being required to wait for genocide to begin before acting. For these

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reasons, the report did not reach conclusions on numbers of deaths, but the trigger to protect is understood to be real or potential killings and destruction on a mass scale (that is, thousands, not hundreds). The second criterion is the Right Intention. This stipulates that the primary purpose of the intervention must be to halt or avert human suffering. To ensure that this criterion is satised, military intervention is best done on a collective or multilateral basis and supported by the people for whose benet it is intended. The opinion of other countries in the region should be taken into account and should be supportive. Thirdly, a military intervention must be the Last Resort, as military intervention can only be justied when every non-military option for the prevention or peaceful resolution of the crisis has been explored, with reasonable grounds for believing that lesser measures would not succeed. The responsibility to react with military force can be justied only when the responsibility to prevent has been fully discharged. The fourth principle, Proportional Means, calls for the scale, duration and intensity of the planned military intervention to be the minimum necessary to secure the dened objective of protecting people. The scale of action taken must be commensurate with its stated purpose and with the magnitude of the original provocation. It should not, for example, include regime change as an objective, though that may be a collateral result. The report also describes the highly pragmatic Reasonable Prospects principle. This means there must be a reasonable chance of success in halting or averting the suffering that has justied the intervention. The consequences of action should not be worse than the consequences of inaction. Military action must not risk triggering a wider conict. As a practical matter, according to this principle, action against a major power, including any one of the permanent members of the Security Council, would be ruled out. The Question of Authorisation What about the question of authorisation? The Responsibility to Protect is clear: the primary authority for authorising military action for human protection purposes is the Security Council.5 The legitimacy of any such action will best be assured by the multilateral approval of the UN. Unilateral action will always be seen as self-interested and suspect. The Commissions clear objective was not to nd alternatives to the authority of the Security Council, but to make the Council work better. At the same time, as Secretary-General Annan himself said in 1999:
If the collective conscience of humanity a conscience which abhors cruelty, renounces injustice and seeks peace for all peoples cannot nd in the United Nations its greatest tribune, there is a grave danger that it will look elsewhere for peace and justice.

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The Commission considered what might be done in the face of paralysis by the Council. Here the alternatives included working through the General Assembly via the Uniting for Peace provision, as was done in several interventions in the 1950s and 1960s. Another alternative is recourse to regional organisations, subject to their authorisation after the fact by the Security Council. However, I must stress that none of these scenarios is considered preferable to the Security Council authorisation in the rst instance, but they may arise out of necessity when the need for action is overwhelming and the Council is paralysed by the veto. The Commissions conclusion is therefore to press the Council to act, whether on its own initiative or in response to entreaties by member states or the SecretaryGeneral. A key recommendation aimed at avoiding paralysis by the Security Council is to restrict the use of the veto. The Commission argues that it should be limited to situations that engage the vital national interests of one of the permanent members. Political Will Some worry about the prospect of too much intervention while others worry about the reality of too little. The Responsibility to Protect stresses the decisiveness of political will in reaching consensus on when to act in the face of genocide, ethnic cleansing and other atrocities.5 As in the case of Rwanda and Bosnia, the Councils authorisation was no guarantee for effective action. Political will is needed to use the existing instruments at our disposal exibly and creatively to meet the needs of the day. This means engaging in preventive diplomacy, imposing sanctions or taking coercive action when needed. It also means developing peace operation mandates that are suited to the situation on the ground and have the resources to do the job. Political Will can be raised through events such as this Medact Conference. This places the spotlight on humanitarian interventions and enables democratic societies to shape national positions on and contributions to collective military action to protect civilians and the common sense demand for action to curb atrocities. The challenge now is for us to continue to discuss this report, and to bring it to the attention of our politicians, so that they will have the political will to forward The Responsibility to Protect on the international stage. Canadas Position In the autumn of 2002, Canada introduced a draft technical resolution taking note of the report and locking-in further consideration of it by the General Assembly of the UN. The resolution encountered resistance from a number of member states (particularly those traditionally protective of

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sovereignty and non-interference in internal affairs of states) who requested more time to discuss the substance of the report before moving on a resolution. While the resolution has not been withdrawn, no immediate voting action will be taken. Instead, more time will be devoted to informal discussion of the report and its implications for the UN system. In support of these efforts, Canada has struck an informal group of friends of the responsibility to protect whose core membership is growing. We also plan to use the Human Security Network6 in support of follow-up efforts. Canadas leadership of the follow-up effort does not require that we embrace all aspects of the report, and no formal Canadian position has been taken. Rather we view it as a vehicle for promoting international discussion and greater agreement on issues of human protection action by the international community, including the strengthening of new norms and practices in this eld. Broadly, we believe The Responsibility to Protect is an important contribution to human security and to the continuing debate over the legitimate use of force by the international community to protect civilians. In particular, we view it as an opportunity to strengthen the UNs fundamental peace and security mandate and norm-building function. Whats Next? Clearly the responsibility to protect involves further challenges at the political, normative and operational level. But the ICISS report provides a helpful framework and roadmap to guide the decisions that will inevitably need to be made when conscience-shocking situations cry out for action in the future. I believe it is fair to say that the gulf in the protection debate has narrowed in recent years. Who today would question that there should have been action to stop the genocide in Rwanda? Consensus is also being reached at the regional level, for example by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and Southern Africa Development Community (SADC), on collective responsibilities and action in their jurisdictions. The Responsibility to Protect should appeal to those with legitimate concerns about intervention. The report is about more, not fewer, rules to govern the use of force by the international community. It is also about enabling the UN and the Security Council to do its job better and more consistently. It is a hedge against unilateralism or action taken without Security Council authorisation. Canadas goal is to build as broad and strong a consensus as possible, the consensus that Secretary-General Annan challenged us to achieve. Canadas goal is also to keep the UN and its unique legitimacy at the centre of that consensus.

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References 1. Melvern L. Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide. London: Verso, 2004. 2. Rose M. Fighting for Peace. London: Harvill, 1998. 3. Annan K. We the Peoples: the Role of the United Nations in the 21st Century. Millennium Report of the Secretary General of the United Nations. New York: United Nations, 2000. At: 5 http://www.un.org/millennium/sg/report/full.htm 4 (accessed 1 Sept. 2004). 4. International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS). At: 5 http://www.dfait-maeci.gc.ca/iciss-ciise/menu-en.asp 4 (accessed 1 Sept. 2004). 5. International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. The Responsibility to Protect. Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 2001. 6. The Human Security Network. At: 5 http://www.humansecuritynetwork.org/ menu-e.php 4 (accessed 1 Sept. 2004). (Accepted 4 September 2004) Matt Deutscher is Second Secretary (Political) at the Canadian High Commission in London, where he is responsible for human rights, human security, the Commonwealth and NGO outreach. He was previously Desk Ofcer for Croatia/ Bosnia and Herzegovina at the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade in Ottawa. Correspondence: Canadian High Commission, Macdonald House, 1 Grosvenor Square, London W1K 4AB; email: 5 matt.deutscher@dfait-maeci.gc.ca 4 .