The Responsibility to Protect

The Basic Principles of R2P

A. State sovereignty implies responsibility, and the primary responsibility for the protection of its people lies within the state itself.

B. Where a population is suffering serious harm, as a result of internal war, insurgency, repression or state failure, and the state in question is unwilling or unable to halt or avert it, the principle of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect.

Why was the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) Developed?

During the 1990s, millions of lives were lost due to genocidal violence in Rwanda and Bosnia.The international community could not agree on the appropriate response to these mass atrocities. When it did respond, its efforts were often too little and/or too late.

The main source of controversy is the apparent contradiction between sovereignty and humanitarian intervention. Sovereignty is one of the guiding principles of international relations: externally, states are equal despite of size and wealth; internally, they have the authority to make decisions with regard to the people and resources within their territory.

In this sense, humanitarian interventions - occasions in which the international community forcefully intervenes in a state to protect their population - seem to contradict the principle of sovereignty. However, UN Secretary-General Koffi Annan posed the all-important 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 affect every precept of our common humanity?"

The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, sponsored by the Canadian government, decided to take on Annan's plea. The result was the R2P doctrine, which aims to bridge the gap between the principle of state sovereignty and the need for humanitarian intervention to protect people at risk.

How the United States has incorporated R2P

The United States has begun to incorporate the Responsibility to Protect doctrine within their resolutions. Paragraphs 138 and 139 of the United Nation's 2005 World Summit Outcome narrowed the Responsibility to Protect doctrine to mean the following:

Each individual State has the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. This responsibility entails the prevention of such crimes, including their incitement, through appropriate and necessary means. We accept this responsibility and will act in accordance with it... (¶ 138).

Regarding the current genocide in Darfur, the United Nations passed Resolution 1769 on July 31, 2007, authorizing the deployment of an UN-African Union hybrid force, which said:

While Resolution 1769 maintains the sovereignty of the Government of Sudan, it also endorses Resolution 1674 on the protection of civilians in armed conflict, which reaffirms the provisions of paragraphs 138 and 139 of the 2005 World Summit Outcome Document regarding the responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.

The basic principles of the "Responsibility to Protect"

The R2P doctrine is based on 2 basic principles:

State sovereignty implies responsibility, and the primary responsibility for the protection of its people lies with the state itself.
Where a population is suffering serious harm, as a result of internal war, insurgency, repression or state failure, and the state in question is unwilling or unable to halt or avert it, the principle of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect.

Sovereignty, thus, implies the responsibility to not only to respect other states' sovereignty, but also a responsibility to protect a country's population. Conversely, the international community does not only have the right to intervene when a country is unable or unwilling to protect its people, but also a responsibility to do so.

Prevention is the single most important dimension of the responsibility to protect. If prevention fails, however, the international community has the responsibility to employ whatever measures may be necessary to protect lives. If military intervention is needed, individual states and the international community have the responsibility to assist with the reconstruction efforts in order to ensure that violence does not erupt again.

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