What is R2P and the Responsibility to Protect?

Renee Dopplick
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Background Fact Sheet
What is R2P and the Responsibility to Protect?

The emergent and controversial humanitarian doctrine of “responsibility to protect,” also referred to as R2P, confers upon states the primary duty to ensure individual human rights domestically and, in the event of a failure of that affirmative duty, seeks to create an ethical and legal justification for international intervention, including the possibility of military action in the absence of state consent.

The recent doctrine developed largely in response to the challenges posed by situations in Rwanda, Bosnia, East Timor, Angola, and Somalia. Specifically, the international community largely failed to act in response to the genocide in Rwanda. Further, there was a controversial military intervention to halt ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. Similarly, military interventions sought to thwart crimes against humanity in domestic conflicts from East Timor to Angola.

These experiences have challenged the presumptive notion of state sovereign immunity. The status quo of state sovereignty holds that intrastate violence, ethnic wars, and solely domestic issues cannot constitute internationally wrongful acts justifying intervention by the international community UNLESS the state provides prior CONSENT to be bound by the consequences.

Prior humanitarian interventions in domestic crises under Security Council Chapter VII powers occurred with state consent or the elements of consent in situations of failed states, such as in Yugoslavia. Thus, the international community faced the question of whether coercive interventions could be lawfully authorized or conducted by the United Nations, regional actors, or individual nation-states to prevent or halt mass atrocities in a state unable or unwilling to protect its citizens.

In 1999, the UN Secretary-General challenged world leaders to rethink human security and the Charter’s principles of nonintervention in the context of a new era of collective responsibility. See The Secretary-General, Speech before the General Assembly, (Sept. 20, 1999). He asserted an emerging normative shift from state consent to state responsibility and the growing belief that state sovereignty is not absolute and is subject to scrutiny by other governments when a state fails to uphold its obligations towards its citizens, particularly with regards to gross human rights violations and humanitarian emergencies. He concluded with four aspects of intervention for future interventions: (1) a broadened definition of intervention, (2) sovereignty cannot preclude effective global engagement to human rights and humanitarian crises, (3) the Security Council must act in defense of “common humanity,” and (4) the necessity of crisis prevention. His call to action for a humanitarian rationale for intervention prompted academic debate and efforts to develop standards for international humanitarian intervention without consent.

In 2001, the newly created International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty released The Responsibility to Protect Report as a means to address the scope, state responsibilities, thresholds for international action, and the Security Council’s role. The report identified what should be the new legal framework under international law, asserting “that sovereign states have a responsibility to protect their own citizens from avoidable catastrophe – from mass murder and rape, from starvation – but that when they are unwilling or unable to do so, that responsibility must be borne by the broader community of states.” Proponents of the responsibility to protect highlight that the doctrine confers an affirmative obligation by sovereign states to protect individual rights domestically rather than an automatic and affirmative right by the international community to intervene, except in extraordinary circumstances. Opponents question the legality, procedural safeguards, and potential misuse of the power by the international community.

The The Responsibility to Protect Report of December 2001 identified the following guiding principles for coercive interventions:

  • Right Intention
    The primary purpose of the intervention must be to halt or avert human suffering.
  • Last Resort
    Every diplomatic and non-military avenue for the prevention or peaceful resolution of the humanitarian crisis must have been explored.
  • Proportional Means
    The scale, duration and intensity of the planned military intervention should be the minimum necessary to secure the humanitarian objective in question.
  • Reasonable Prospects
    Military action can only be justified if it stands a reasonable chance of success, that is, halting or averting the atrocities or suffering that triggered the intervention in the first place.
  • Right Authority
    Security Council authorization must in all cases be sought prior to any military intervention action being carried out. Those calling for an intervention must formally request such authorization, or have the Council raise the matter on its own initiative, or have the Secretary-General raise it under Article 99 of the UN Charter; and the Security Council should deal promptly with any request for authority to intervene where there are allegations of large scale loss of human life or ethnic cleansing; it should in this context seek adequate verification of facts or conditions on the ground that might support a military intervention.

    * These are excerpts. See the Report for the full explanatory text.

The Commission’s report received endorsement in 2004 when a UN High-Level Panel made responsibility to protect a central concept in its recommendations for collective security as premised on three pillars: (1) the globalization of threats domestically and internationally, (2) the inability of any one state to respond solely and effectively to globalized threats, and (3) the assumption that states may be unwilling or unable to carry out obligations to protect individual rights domestically and to avoid harm to the people of other countries. The Panel called upon states to redefine collective security as inclusive of a commitment to human security and collective responsibility and urged states to create broader criteria for when to react collectively to threats or state failure to act. See Chairman, High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change, Report of The High-Level Panel On Threats, Challenges And Change, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, U.N. Doc. A/59/565 (Dec. 2, 2004).

The global community has reached consensus on some obligations under responsibility to protect. In 2005, the UN General Assembly recognized the specific obligation of all states to prevent genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity and asserted a concurrent responsibility by the international community to support states’ efforts of prevention and capacity building. See World Summit Outcome Document, G.A. Res. 60/1 139, U.N. Doc. A/60/L.1 (Sept. 20, 2005). The General Assembly’s endorsement, while lauded for its support of ending human rights violations with grave humanitarian consequences, created political obligations but not necessarily legal obligations.

In January 2009, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon released a report: “Implementing the Responsibility to Protect.” In the report, he calls for a three-pronged approach to implementing R2P: (1) prevention, (2) persuasion, education, and training, and (3) “timely and decisive action” rather than “arbitrary, sequential or graduated policy.”

Resources

InsideJustice.com

Organizations

R2P Documents

Articles

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