The emergence of the Responsibility to Protect

The tragic events of the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century in Darfur, Kosovo, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Srebrenica have triggered a fundamental rethinking of the role and responsibility of the international community. Indeed, the international community seems to have learned some painful but powerful lessons.

In these and many other cases, the international community, and perhaps first and foremost the Security Council of the United Nations (UN), dramatically failed in their historic promise and aspiration to prevent genocide and other mass atrocities. The truth is that there was simply a lack of sufficiently strong political will, agreement or support to undertake tasks that would have been perfectly possible from a logistical perspective, and which would have saved the lives of millions of people. While in many of these cases troops were eventually sent, intervention was often too late and always too little. Srebrenica stands out as an illustration of a mismatch between the aspiration of prevention, on the one hand, and the number and capabilities of the troops that were actually deployed, on the other.

Then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan captured the general perception that lessons should be learned when he said in 1999 in the UN General Assembly that the international community should try and forge, once and for all, a consensus on how the international community should respond to ‘a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica – to gross and systematic violations of human rights that affect every precept of our common humanity’.

What followed was a decade-long debate on how to reconcile the two fundamental principles of international law that lie at the foundation of the UN Charter. On the one hand, each state has the sovereign right to freedom from interference in its domestic affairs and from the threat or use of military force against its territory, enshrined in Articles 2(7) and 2(4) of the UN Charter. On the other hand, all states are obliged to protect human rights and fundamental freedoms, which the UN Charter declares to be one of the very purposes of the UN.