Responsibility to Protect is a policy doctrine that was endorsed by the United Nations (UN) Summit Meeting in 2005. It affirms the primary obligation of states to protect its population against harm and, failing that, a secondary responsibility by the international community to take collective action, and, in accordance with the UN Charter, to “help protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity” ( UN 2005, para. 139). While frequently cited in UN Security Council resolutions, the doctrine has only been invoked once to justify military intervention–in Libya in March 2011. In the academic literature, it is controversial.
The doctrine developed from mounting international concern in the 1990s over rights and obligations relating to the protection of civilians in situations of mass atrocities. The near-paralysis of the UN during the genocides in Rwanda (1994) and Srebrenica (1995) generated demands for effective international intervention on humanitarian grounds. However, the military intervention by NATO in Kosovo four years later–while justified on humanitarian grounds and arguably effective in protecting an ethnic minority from further death and displacement–was not authorized by the UN Security Council and was thus illegal under international law. The conflicting implications of these cases accelerated efforts initiated earlier in the UN to strengthen the normative basis for humanitarian intervention. The result was a Canadian semi-official report issued in 2001 ( ICISS 2001). Building on the concept of “sovereignty as responsibility,” the report essentially argues that effectiveness generates rights: a government that cannot effectively protect its population against mass atrocities–defined as genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity–forfeits its right to sovereignty, and the responsibility of protection falls to the international community.
The UN Secretariat under Secretary-General Kofi Annan took the work forward, but the text approved at the World Summit in 2005 was noticeably careful. Potential target states and intervening powers alike refused to add new binding, legal obligations on states, or to weaken existing restraints on international intervention vested in the Security Council.
What, then, is the significance of the doctrine? Soon known under the emblem R2P, the doctrine generated considerable activity in the academic and policy communities. An international advocacy and research center was formed in 2007, followed by the journal Global Responsibility to Protect. At the UN, the Secretariat established a special advisor on R2P to the Secretary-General and issued annual reports on the subject, while the General Assembly held regularly scheduled “interactive dialogues.” The Security Council frequently referred to the doctrine, but only one of its 63 resolutions calling for protection of civilians during the 2006–2018 period invoked an international responsibility to protect. That was in Libya. On all other occasions, the Security Council merely affirmed that the primary responsibility to protect fell to the government of the state in question.
Debate has followed. Legal scholars note that the doctrine adds nothing to existing rights and obligations under international law developed in relation to humanitarian intervention. Some argue that it nevertheless provides a discursive framework for clarifying rights, obligations, and consequences of choices made in difficult matters of humanitarian intervention; further theorizing and conceptual refinement is therefore important (Orford 2011; Thakur and Maley 2015). Its strongest proponents view the doctrine as a normative guide for action to a more humane world, despite–or precisely because of–the manifest failure of the UN to alleviate mass violence in Darfur and Central Africa in the early 2000s (Evans 2008; Bellamy 2011), and later in Syria and Myanmar. Critics, on the other hand, warn against its potential to legitimize an international regime of trusteeship whose populations “are seen as wards in need of external protection” (Mamdani 2010: 53). The Libyan intervention crystallized fears that the doctrine would be used to justify military action for non-humanitarian reasons (Hehir and Murray 2013). The subsequent unraveling of the Libyan state and society reinforced concerns over the fundamentally problematic aspects of external intervention (Paris 2014) and forms of transnational solidarity (çubukçu 2013).
References
Bellamy, A.J. (2011) Global Politics and the Responsibility to Protect. Routledge.
Çubukçu, A. (2013) The Responsibility to Protect: Libya and the Problem of Transnational Solidarity. Journal of Human Rights, 12(1): 40–58.
Evans, G. (2008) The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and for All. Brookings Institution Press.
Hehir, A. , Murray, R. eds. (2013) Libya, the Responsibility to Protect and the Future of Humanitarian Intervention. Palgrave Macmillan.
ICISS (International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty) (2001) The Responsibility to Protect. Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. http://responsibilitytoprotect.org.
Mamdani, M. (2010) Responsibility to Protect or Right to Punish. Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 4(1): 53–67.
Orford, A. (2011) International Authority and the Responsibility to Protect. Cambridge University Press.
Paris, R. (2014) The “Responsibility to Protect” and Structural Problems of Preventive Humanitarian Intervention. International Peacekeeping, 21(5): 569–603.
Thakur, R. , Maley, W. eds. (2015) Theorising the Responsibility to Protect. Cambridge University Press.
UN (United Nations) (2005) World Summit Outcome. A/60/L.1. United Nations.