Responsibility to Protect

The world has a duty to intervene when people are faced with genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other crimes against humanity.

It is easy to mistake the volubility of the few for the opinion of many. In our consultations around the world in 2001, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty discovered a remarkable openness to the notion of an international responsibility to protect people from mass atrocities by tyrants masquerading as governments. The same conclusion was clear by the end of the UN debate on the Responsibility to Protect, or R2P, in July that helped sideline the small minority of skeptics. Support for R2P may not be deep yet, but it is broad.

Because R2P skeptics had organized the debate, we feared the worst. In a background note, General Assembly President Father Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann of Nicaragua described R2P as redecorated colonialism. But because the expected sparks did not fly, the international press did not follow up on pre-debate warnings of a bust-up with post-debate coverage of strong support for R2P. What bleeds leads, and what does not bleed dies as a news story. Consequently, many have an erroneous impression of the extent of opposition to R2P.

R2P is about protecting vulnerable populations mainly in developing countries. Because they will be the primary victims and potential beneficiaries, the conversation on R2P should be principally among them. In an attempt to paint R2P as largely a Western preoccupation, three of the four invited expert speakers at the UN debate were Westerners. The ploy failed.

The debate was addressed by 94 speakers, nearly two-thirds of them from developing countries. Almost all reaffirmed the 2005 consensus, and insisted that its scope of R2P be restricted to the specified four crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and ethnic cleansing. Several expressed reservations about selectivity and double standards, and some urged voluntary self-restraint in the use of the veto when faced with atrocity crimes.

Caveats aside, there was near-unanimity in accepting state and international responsibility to prevent atrocities through building state will and capacity, providing international assistance, and in grounding these fundamental obligations in the UN Charter, human rights treaties, and international humanitarian law. Most affirmed that, should other measures not be adequate, timely and decisive, coercive action, including the use of force, is warranted to save lives. Only Cuba, Nicaragua, Sudan, and Venezuela rejected the use of force under any circumstance. To have India, the home of my parents, endorse R2P was personally gratifying.

Several speakers kept returning to the core of the R2P: that in extremis, something must be done to avoid a shameful repeat of Rwanda-type inaction. Ghana’s delegate noted R2P attempts to strike a balance between non-interference and what the African Union calls non-indifference. Pro-R2P interventions by East Timor and Rwanda were especially poignant.

Our choice in the real world is not between intervention and nonintervention, but between different modes of intervention: ad hoc or rules-based, unilateral or multilateral, consensual or deeply divisive. The 2005 endorsement of R2P was historic because it spoke to the fundamental purposes of the United Nations and responded to a critical challenge of the 21st century. R2P will help the world to be better prepared – normatively, organisationally, and operationally – to meet the challenge wherever and whenever it arises again, as assuredly it will.

To interveners, R2P offers the prospect of more effective results. To potential targets of intervention, it offers the reassurance of a rules-based system. It is rooted in human solidarity, not in the exceptionalism of the virtuous West against the evil rest. Absent an agreed new set of rules, there will be nothing to stop the powerful from intervening anywhere and everywhere.

R2P is not rooted in abstract notions of sovereignty derived from European thought and practice. Many traditional Asian cultures stress the symbiotic link between loyalty of citizens to sovereigns and duties owed by kings to subjects. India’s constitution imposes R2P-type responsibility on governments in chapters on fundamental rights and directive principles of state policy. Mohamed Sahnoun, co-chair of the original international commission, argues that R2P is a distinctly African contribution to global human rights.

R2P successfully navigates the treacherous shoals between the Scylla of callous indifference to the plight of victims and the Charybdis of self-righteous interference in others’ internal affairs. It is about building responsible state capacity, not undermining state sovereignty. The scope for military intervention is narrow and tight, while the instruments for implementing its prevention and reconstruction responsibilities are plentiful.