The Protection of Civilians as a Thematic Issue on the Security Council's Agenda

In the early 1990s, the Security Council began to intensively address the protection of civilians in armed conflicts in its country-specific decisions. After the United Nations (UN) failures in the Balkans, Somalia and Rwanda, this issue acquired a separate conceptual dimension, reflected for the first time in the 1998 Report of the Secretary-General on the causes of conflict in Africa, when it was defined as a ‘humanitarian imperative’.

The UN's major concerns in this field were the weakening of the adherence to humanitarian norms in conflicts and crisis situations, as well as the fact that civilians had shifted from being indirect victims of hostile armies to representing their main target, and the increase in attacks on relief workers, which was seriously undermining the effectiveness of humanitarian assistance.

The Protection of Civilians (PoC), as discussed in the Council, covers a wide range of issues, and represents the ‘framework for the UN's diplomatic, legal, humanitarian, and human rights activities directed at the protection of populations during armed conflict’. In particular, the inclusion of PoC as a thematic issue on the Security Council's agenda aims to focus discussion on the duties of states and the role of UN organs in safeguarding civilian populations at times of armed conflict. PoC, as recalled by the Secretary-General, serves to help all parties to ‘under stand how their responsibilities for the protection of civilians should be translated into action’.

In the decade between 1999 and 2010, the Council adopted five resolutions on PoC and held 26 Open Debates as a regular follow-up to these resolutions. During the Open Debates, various issues were discussed by the participant states. These include conflict prevention; the fight against impunity; child and refugee protection; security for relief personnel; access to humanitarian assistance; the need to disseminate knowledge of international humanitarian law and to improve its implementation; the ban on weapons such as anti-personnel mines; and including the protection of civilians in peacekeeping mandates. In general terms, the Debates allow states to express their concerns about loopholes in different areas of protection and suggest ways to improve the safeguarding of civilians.