Responsibility to Protect

SEP 16 2005 · 12:00

Heads of state and government convene at the UN Security Council Summit during the 2005 World Summit, the meeting that endorsed the Responsibility to Protect doctrine. Place: UN General Assembly, World Summit, New York Figures: Kofi Annan, UN secretary-general · Gareth Evans and Mohamed Sahnoun, ICISS co-chairs (2001) · the 191 heads of state and government adopting the World Summit Outcome From ICISS to Paragraphs 138-139 The Responsibility to Protect doctrine originates with the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), convened by Canada in 2000 after Kofi Annan's two sovereignties speech challenged the General Assembly to reconcile Westphalian non-intervention with the post-Rwanda, post-Srebrenica conscience of the system. The ICISS report, published December 2001, reframes sovereignty as responsibility: a state's sovereign immunity derives from, and depends on, its discharging the responsibility to protect its own population from mass atrocity. If the state fails or is itself the perpetrator, the responsibility shifts to the international community. Four years of diplomacy convert the ICISS framework into a formal General Assembly text. The 2005 World Summit Outcome, adopted by consensus by all UN member states at the 60th anniversary summit in September 2005, includes paragraphs 138 and 139 setting out R2P. The doctrine is restricted to four crimes (genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity), requires Security Council authorization for any coercive measures, and is framed as a complement to rather than a replacement for the Charter. Libya, Then Syria R2P's first explicit operational invocation is UN Security Council Resolution 1973 of 17 March 2011, authorizing all necessary measures to protect civilians in Libya from the Gaddafi regime's threatened assault on Benghazi. NATO's air campaign that follows is widely judged to have exceeded the protection mandate and become a regime-change operation. Russia and China, who had abstained on 1973, draw the lesson that R2P is a vehicle for Western unilateralism dressed in multilateral cover. Their vetoes on Syria from 2011 through 2024 are the direct consequence. R2P is the most explicit modification of Westphalian sovereignty (see [[peace-of-westphalia-1648]] and [[un-charter-1945]]) ever formally adopted by the United Nations. The doctrine survives in the diplomatic vocabulary; its operational record is one major invocation (Libya), one major non-invocation (Syria), and a long subsequent silence. The contradiction at the heart of liberal hegemony, between the universalist claim and the Great Power vehicle that carries it, is folded into R2P from the start. The 2008 financial crisis closes the window in which the contradiction could be papered over. Video: Former Secretary-General Kofi Annan reflects on the adoption of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine at the 2005 UN World Summit, recorded at the University of Ottawa Centre for International Policy Studies, 2011.