The responsibility to protect (R2P or RtoP) is a global political commitment that was endorsed by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly at the 2005 World Summit in order to address its four key concerns: preventing genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. The R2P doctrine has become a unanimous and well-established international norm since the early 2000s.
The principle of the responsibility to protect is based upon the underlying premise that sovereignty entails a responsibility to protect all populations from mass atrocity crimes and human rights violations. The R2P is based on respect for the norms and principles of international law, especially the underlying principles of law concerning sovereignty, peace and security, human rights, and armed conflict.http://otago.ourarchive.ac.nz/handle/10523/2279. (Judson 2012). The R2P has three pillars: Pillar I—The protection responsibilities of the state: "Each individual state has the responsibility to protect its population from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity." Pillar II—International assistance and capacity-building: States pledge to assist each other in their protection responsibilities. Pillar III—Timely and decisive collective response: If any state is "manifestly failing" in its protection responsibilities, then states should take collective action to protect the population. While there is agreement among states on the responsibility to protect, there is persistent contestation over the applicability of the third pillar in practice. R2P provides a framework for employing existing measures—that is, mediation, early warning mechanisms, economic sanctions, and powers from Chapter VII of the UN Charter—to prevent atrocity crimes and protect civilians from their occurrence. The authority to employ force under the framework of the responsibility to protect rests solely with the UN Security Council (UNSC) and is considered a measure of last resort.
The doctrine of the responsibility to protect has been the subject of considerable debate, particularly about the implementation of the principle by various actors in the context of country-specific situations, such as in Kenya, Libya, Syria, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Palestine.
Definition
The responsibility to protect was unanimously adopted by member states of the UN General Assembly at the 2005 World Summit. This responsibility was articulated in paragraphs 138–139 of the 2005 World Summit Outcome Document, followed by a statement of support in paragraph 140: The above paragraphs in the 2005 World Summit Outcome Document serve as the basis for the intergovernmental agreement on the responsibility to protect. The UN General Assembly adopted the 2005 World Summit Outcome Document in its 2005 Resolution 60/1. The Assembly subsequently committed to continue considering the responsibility to protect with Resolution A/Res/63/308 of October 2009. The UN Security Council first reaffirmed the responsibility to protect in Resolution 1674 (2006)—on the protection of civilians in armed conflict—recalling in particular paragraphs 138 and 139 of the 2005 Summit Outcome Document about the responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity.
Scope and limitations The report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, which first articulated the responsibility to protect in its December 2001 report, envisioned a wide scope of application in its articulation of the principle. This scope included "overwhelming natural or environmental catastrophes, where the state concerned is either unwilling or unable to cope, or call for assistance, and significant loss of life is occurring or threatened."
Heads of state and government at the 2005 World Summit refined the scope of the R2P to the four crimes mentioned in paragraphs 138 and 139 of the Outcome Document—namely genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity—which are commonly referred to as 'atrocity crimes' or 'mass atrocity crimes'.
As stated in the Secretary-General's 2009 report on the responsibility to protect, Implementing the Responsibility to Protect:
The focused scope is part of what the UN Secretary-General has termed a "narrow but deep approach" to the responsibility to protect: a narrow application to four crimes, but a deep approach to responding, employing the wide array of instruments for prevention and protection that are available to member states, the United Nations system, regional and subregional organizations, and civil society.
Three pillars The responsibility to protect consists of three important and mutually-reinforcing pillars, as articulated in the 2009 report of the Secretary-General on the issue, which build on paragraphs 138 and 139 of the 2005 World Summit Outcome Document and the intergovernmental agreement on principle: Pillar I—The protection responsibilities of the state: "Each individual state has the responsibility to protect its population from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity." Pillar II—International assistance and capacity-building: States pledge to assist each other in fulfilling their protection responsibilities. Pillar III—Timely and decisive collective response: If any state is "manifestly failing" in its protection responsibilities, then states should take collective action to protect the population. While there is widespread agreement among states about the responsibility to protect (only Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Sudan have questioned its validity), there is persistent contestation about the applicability of the third pillar in practice.
According to the UN Secretary-General's 2012 report, the three pillars of the R2P are not sequential and are of equal importance. "Without all three, the concept would be incomplete. All three pillars must be implemented in a manner fully consistent with the purposes, principles, and provisions of the Charter." The pillared approach is intended to reinforce, not undermine state sovereignty. As noted in the 2009 report of the Secretary-General, "By helping States to meet their core protection responsibilities, the responsibility to protect seeks to strengthen sovereignty, not weaken it. It seeks to help States to succeed, not just to react when they fail."
Humanitarian intervention The responsibility to protect differs from humanitarian intervention in four important ways.
First, humanitarian intervention refers only to the use of military force, whereas the responsibility to protect (R2P) is first and foremost a preventive principle that emphasizes a range of measures to stem the risk of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity before such crimes are threatened or occur. The use of force may only be carried out as a measure of last resort, when all other non-coercive measures have failed, and only when it is authorized by the UN Security Council. This principle contrasts with the principle of humanitarian intervention, which claims to allow for the use of force as a humanitarian imperative without authorization by the Security Council.
The second point relates to the first point. As a principle, the responsibility to protect is rooted firmly in existing international law, especially the law relating to sovereignty, peace and security, human rights, and armed conflict.
Third, while humanitarian interventions have previously been justified in the context of various situations, R2P focuses only on the four mass atrocity crimes: genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing. The first three of these crimes are clearly defined in international law and codified in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the treaty that established the International Criminal Court. Ethnic cleansing is not a crime defined under international law, but it has been defined by the UN as "a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas".
Finally, while humanitarian intervention assumes a "right to intervene", the R2P is based on a "responsibility to protect". Humanitarian intervention and the R2P both agree on the fact that sovereignty is not absolute. However, the R2P doctrine shifts away from state-centered motivations to the interests of victims, by focusing not on the right of states to intervene but on a responsibility to protect populations at risk.GSDRC (2013). International legal frameworks for humanitarian action: Topic guide. Birmingham, UK: GSDRC, University of Birmingham In addition, this doctrine introduces a new way of regarding the essence of sovereignty—moving away from issues of "control" and emphasizing "responsibility" to one's own citizens and the wider international community.Arbour, 2008; Evans, 2006–7
History 1990s: origins The norm of the R2P was born out of the international community's failure to respond to tragedies such as the Rwandan genocide in 1994 and the Srebrenica genocide in 1995. Kofi Annan, who was Assistant Secretary-General at the UN Department for Peacekeeping Operations during the Rwandan genocide, realized the international community's failure to respond. In the wake of the Kosovo intervention in 1999, Annan insisted that traditional notions of sovereignty had been redefined: "States are now widely understood to be instruments at the service of their peoples",K. Annan, Two Concepts of Sovereignty, ECONOMIST, Sept. 18, 1999, at 49, 49; https://www.economist.com/international/1999/09/16/two-concepts-of-sovereignty he said, while US President Bill Clinton cited human rights concerns in 46% of the hundreds of remarks that he made justifying intervention in Kosovo.N.Kerton-Johnson, JUSTIFYING AMERICA'S WARS: THE CONDUCT AND PRACTICE OF US MILITARY INTERVENTION 63–64 (2011). In 2000, in his capacity as UN Secretary-General, Annan wrote the report "We the Peoples" on the role of the United Nations in the 21st century. In this report, he posed the following question: "if humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica—to gross and systematic violations of human rights that offend every precept of our common humanity?"
2000: African Union proposes a right to intervene The African Union (AU) claimed a responsibility to intervene in crises if a state is failing to protect its population from mass atrocity crimes. In 2000, the AU incorporated the right to intervene in a member state, as enshrined in Article 4(h) of its Constitutive Act, which declares "[t]he right of the Union to intervene in a Member State pursuant to a decision of the Assembly in respect of grave circumstances, namely war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity". The AU also adopted the Ezulwini Consensus in 2005, which welcomed R2P as a tool for preventing mass atrocities.
2000: International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty In September 2000, following an appeal by its Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy, the Canadian government established the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) to answer Annan's question "if humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica—to gross and systematic violations of human rights that offend every precept of our common humanity?" In February 2001, at the third roundtable meeting of the ICISS in London, Gareth Evans, Mohamed Sahnoun, and Michael Ignatieff suggested the phrase "responsibility to protect" as a way to avoid the "right to intervene" or "obligation to intervene" doctrines, and yet maintain a degree of duty to act to resolve humanitarian crises.