Whither the Responsibility to Protect? Humanitarian Intervention and the 2005 World Summit

Abstract

At the 2005 World Summit, the world‘s leaders committed themselves to the “responsibility to protect”, recognizing both that all states have a responsibility to protect their citizens from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and that the UN should help states to discharge this responsibility using either peaceful means or enforcement action. This declaration ostensibly marks an important milestone in the relationship between sovereignty and human rights but its critics argue that it will make little difference in practice to the world’s most threatened people. The purpose of this article is to ask how consensus was reached on the responsibility to protect, given continuing hostility to humanitarian intervention expressed by many (if not most) of the world‘s states and whether the consensus will contribute to avoiding future Kosovos (cases where the Security Council is deadlocked in the face of a humanitarian crises) and future Rwandas (cases where states lack the political will to intervene). It suggests that four key factors contributed to the consensus: pressure from proponents of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, its adoption by Kofi Annan and the UN’s High Level Panel, an emerging consensus in the African Union, and the American position. Whilst these four factors contributed to consensus, each altered the meaning of the responsibility to protect in important ways, creating a doctrine that many states can sign up to but that does little to prevent future Kosovos and Rwandas and may actually inhibit attempts to build a consensus around intervention in future cases.

Rising powers and the responsibility to protect: will the norm survive in the age of BRICS?

“…These are not a new debate, but something that was considered already in the 2001 ICISS report that first coined the RtoP concept. Interestingly, while the BRICS countries then as now insisted that the UNSC should be the instance overseeing RtoP, they were in 2005 reluctant to specify criteria for when it should apply (Bellamy, 2006).…”

From stopping to preventing atrocities

“…Technically, the answer is negative given that through binding themselves to the Constitutive Act, the AU member states have consented to make themselves subject to intervention should the AU Assembly deem appropriate. 77 Lieblich has argued that a government that fails to fulfil its responsibility to protect also loses the capacity to withdraw its prior consent in such cases. 78 Nonetheless, Chapter VII as read with Article 53(1) of the UN Charter requires that any enforcement action by a regional organisation should be authorised by the UNSC.…”

Changing ideas, changing norms: The case of ‘the responsibility to rebuild’

“…In the Summit Outcome Document two paragraphs were dedicated to the R2P, where states declared their commitment to the principle. One of most significant changes from the ICISS' version of the R2P, and one that elicited great deal scholarly attention (Bellamy 2006, Weiss 2006, Hehir 2010, was the emphasis on states' responsibilities to protect their respective populations, at the expense of the contentious idea of such responsibility residing in the international realm. This marked a move towards a more statist vision of protection responsibilities.…”

“…The positions of the key states and the debates in the years following the publication of the ICISS report have been extensively scrutinized in the existing literature (Bellamy 2006, Wheeler 2005) and due to space constraints cannot be rehearsed in full here. In brief, the notion of responsibility to protect was unacceptable to many developing states as it was seen as a pretext for further Western interventionism and direct threat to sovereignty (Bellamy 2006:151-152, Cater andMalone 2016:122-124).…”

“…For Washington the commitment to protection tasks, even where no clear US interest was at stake, made the principle restrictive and as a result, unattractive (Bellamy 2006:151). Due to the reluctance by some of the major powers to endorse the notion of responsibility to react to mass atrocities, a modified version of the principle was endorsed in the 2005 UN World Summit (Bellamy 2006). In the Summit Outcome Document two paragraphs were dedicated to the R2P, where states declared their commitment to the principle.…”