The essay topic is - Responsibility to Protect Doctrine

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The essay topic is - Responsibility to Protect Doctrine. The Dillemmas of Sovereignty and Intervention - Richard FalkURL

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61jhr06x.qxd 07/02/02 15:56 Page 81 Humanitarian Intervention and State Sovereignty M O H A M M E D AYO O B It is increasingly apparent that the greatest challenge to the notion of international society comes from the new found proclivity on the part of major powers as well as international and regional organisations to intervene in the domestic affairs of juridically sovereign states for ostensibly humanitarian purposes.1 The concept of international society privileges the state as the sole repository of sovereign authority and is based on the assumption that international order can be best maintained if states respect each other’s sovereignty by adhering to the norms of non-intervention in the internal affairs of other states. This has been the fundamental premise on whose basis the rules and institutions governing international society, including international law, diplomacy, and international organisations, have been traditionally established.2 Respect for state sovereignty, therefore, forms the cornerstone of what Robert Jackson has termed the ‘global covenant’ which, in turn, acts as the foundation for international order. Respect for this covenant is all the more important in the contemporary context where membership of the international system has expanded exponentially and the notion of a common (European) culture undergirding international order has been dramatically eroded.3 In contrast to this global covenant which emphasises sovereignty and nonintervention, the proclaimed goal of humanitarian intervention, undertaken with increasing frequency during the last decade, is to protect the citizens of the target state from flagrant violations of their fundamental human rights usually by agents of the state. These rights are defined as being vested in individuals as members of the human race. They exist independent of their status as citizens of particular states. While this may be true at one level, it does not provide the complete picture. For, as David Forsythe has pointed out, ‘Even if human rights are thought to be inalienable, a moral attribute of persons that the state cannot contravene, rights still have to be identified – that is, constructed – by human beings and codified in legal systems.’4 Therefore, the question of agency – who constructs and codifies human rights – becomes important. This, as we will see later, has an important bearing on the issue of humanitarian intervention because those who define human rights and decree that they have been violated also decide when and where intervention to protect such rights should and must take place. Mohammed Ayoob, James Madison College, Michigan State University The International Journal of Human Rights, Vol.6, No.1 (Spring 2002) pp.81–102 PU B L I S H E D BY F RA N K C A S S , LO N D O N 61jhr06x.qxd 82 07/02/02 15:56 Page 82 T H E I N T E R N AT I O N A L J O U R N A L O F H U M A N R I G H T S Humanitarian interventions have also been conducted in some cases where existing institutions of the state, for one reason or another, have been rendered incapable of providing even the minimum degree of security and order to their populations. Their citizens’ lives, in terms of Hobbes’s classic formulation, have therefore become ‘poor, nasty, brutish and short’. In other words, these are instances where the state has failed or collapsed and the social contract binding the subject to the sovereign ceases to operate.5 In such cases sovereignty ceases to exist and, therefore, the rules of international society that privilege state sovereignty are no longer relevant. External intervention, therefore, does not derogate from state sovereignty for none exists. This is a very different argument from the one that decries the use of sovereignty as a tool used by the agents of the state to violate the human rights of citizens with impunity. It will be addressed briefly at the end of the article separate from, but connected to, the main body of the argument. SOVEREIGNTY AS AUTHORITY In order to analyse the problem of intervention and state sovereignty, it will be appropriate first to define the term sovereignty itself. Sovereignty is often defined in terms of internal control and external autonomy. However, since both control and autonomy wax and wane in the real world of politics, it is better to define sovereignty as authority (the right to rule over a delimited territory and the population residing within it).6 Such a definition accepts that sovereignty has both internal and external dimensions. However, it has certain advantages in comparison to definitions based on control and autonomy since it is a normative construct used to signify the standard of behaviour among members of international society. International norms, including those of sovereignty, are expected to hold despite variations, including violations, which occur in particular cases. Degrees of control and autonomy can vary as they always do in particular instances, but the right to rule remains the constant ingredient of sovereignty even when control is diminished and autonomy diluted. Sovereignty is thus not only an internal attribute of states. It is based in substantial part on recognition by the community of peers (states) and is as much constituted by external recognition as by internal acquiescence. Such recognition and constitution of sovereignty by international norms are important in an international system in which power is distributed in a highly unequal fashion. This is the case because, as Benedict Kingsbury has pointed out, ‘The normative inhibitions associated with sovereignty moderate existing inequalities of power between states, and provide a shield for weak states and weak institutions. These inequalities will become more pronounced if the universal normative understandings associated with sovereignty are to be discarded.’7 The capacity of sovereignty to act as a normative barrier to unwanted external intervention should not be underrated. International society is based on a set of normative structures, with sovereignty being the foremost among them. If these structures are undermined, it may lead to 61jhr06x.qxd 07/02/02 15:56 Page 83 F O R U M O N H U M A N I TA R I A N I N T E RV E N T I O N 83 either unadulterated anarchy or unmitigated hegemony or a combination of the two – anarchy within and hegemony without. HUMAN RIGHTS AND SOVEREIGNTY How does this conception of sovereignty square with the concern for human rights (and more particularly their violation) that has been demonstrated by members of international society increasingly during the past few decades? This concern acquired much greater intensity and seriousness of purpose during the 1990s. It has, in fact, become fashionable these days to dismiss the notion of sovereignty as an anachronism or to dilute it so greatly as to make its operation ineffectual when it suits major powers or important international constituencies. Both the current UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, and his predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, have gone on record to declare that state sovereignty is not absolute and exclusive and can be circumscribed, even overridden, in special circumstances. These statements as well as actions authorised by the UN Security Council and undertaken by multinational coalitions, including organisations like NATO, during the past decade demonstrate an inherent tension between international concern increasingly translated into intervention for humanitarian purposes and the notion of sovereignty. Non-intervention in the domestic affairs of states is an essential corollary of sovereignty. It acts as a ‘no trespassing’ sign protecting the exclusive territorial domain of states.8 This sign has not prevented all external intervention into the affairs of states because signs by themselves are never able to keep off all trespassers. Strong states have routinely intervened, even forcibly, in the affairs of weaker ones. Nevertheless, during the past 50 years, following the emergence of postcolonial states in large numbers, the notion of sovereignty and its corollary of non-intervention had forced the strong to make at least mildly credible cases for intervention into the affairs of the weak. Sovereignty had thus acted as a restraint on the former’s interventionary instincts. THE NEW INTERVENTIONISM During the past ten years, however, the notion of intervention has been given a qualitatively new and different thrust. This has been done in two ways. First, intervention is increasingly defined in terms of purposes or goals which are radically different from the traditional objectives that intervention was expected to achieve before the 1990s. These new goals are supposed to be humanitarian and universal in character rather than political and strategic and, therefore, specific in nature. Second, intervention is sought to be projected as being undertaken by, or on behalf of, the ‘international community’ rather than by a state or a coalition of states for its/their own ends. States that undertake intervention portray themselves as acting as agents of the ‘international community’. In short such intervention is represented as ‘international’ intervention that is undertaken to 61jhr06x.qxd 84 07/02/02 15:56 Page 84 T H E I N T E R N AT I O N A L J O U R N A L O F H U M A N R I G H T S achieve ‘humanitarian’ objectives. It is further argued that these objectives are intrinsically far too valuable to be held hostage to the norm of state sovereignty and, therefore, ought to override that norm.9 In other words, ‘sovereignty is no longer sacrosanct’.10 This is a radical departure from the Cold War era when intervention was undertaken unabashedly to promote strategic ends, and justifications were provided within the framework of sovereignty (often that such intervention bolstered the sovereignty of the target states and the stability of their regimes) rather than in contravention of that norm. SOVEREIGNTY AS RESPONSIBILITY Simultaneously, there has been a concerted attempt beginning in the 1990s to redefine sovereignty to include the notion of responsibility as well as authority.11 This has meant adding ‘respect for a minimal standard of human rights’ as an essential attribute of sovereignty. Such responsibility, according to this line of reasoning, is owed by the state both to its people and to the international community and those of its institutions that have come to be seen as the guardians of international norms of civilised behaviour. In other words, the state has to act toward its citizens in ways that meet not only with the approval of the latter but also of other states and certain crucial international organisations. Without denying the considerable moral force of the ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ approach, one cannot help but notice echoes of the ‘standard of civilisation’ argument in this proposition.12 According to this latter thesis, which was the prevailing political wisdom in Europe until the end of the nineteenth century, only those countries that had reached a certain standard of civilised behaviour had the right to attain sovereign status and interact with each other on the basis of mutual recognition of sovereignty. The others, being barbarians if not savages, were to remain subject to, or under the tutelage of, sovereign (European) powers. Where they could not be subjugated, as was the case with the Ottoman Empire, rules of European international law that enjoined reciprocity in interstate interactions did not apply to them. This denied them the protection of norms that had been developed in Europe to govern interstate relations, the chief among them being the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of states. It is interesting to note in this context that ‘capitulations’ were originally extended by the Ottomans as ‘extraterritorial jurisdiction to European “infidels” who could not be expected to understand the religious codes which regulated the daily lives of the Sublime Porte’s other subjects’. However, ‘as the standard of “civilisation” emerged as an explicit legal concept, the capitulations became a symbol in European eyes of Ottoman inability to uphold “civilised” standards.’13 Voluntary, even magnanimous, concessions were transformed into instruments of discrimination that then became justifications for further discriminatory treatment. The resurrection of the ‘standard of civilisation’ assumptions in the late twentieth century, and their application under the guise of ‘sovereignty as 61jhr06x.qxd 07/02/02 15:56 Page 85 F O R U M O N H U M A N I TA R I A N I N T E RV E N T I O N 85 responsibility’ thesis, once again raises the spectre of a return to colonial habits and practices on the part of major Western powers. It also has the potential to divide the world once again into zones of civilised and uncivilised states and legitimise predatory actions by the former against the latter. As Benedict Kingsbury points out ‘The theory of liberal and nonliberal zones proposes differential treatment where the boundaries of the liberal zone are crossed, conferring privileges based on membership in the liberal zone, and setting high barriers to entry [T]he outcome seems likely to be the maintenance of a classificatory system which is itself both an explanation and a justification for those at the margins remaining there for generations.’14 This is likely to erode the legitimacy of an international society that for the first time has become truly global in character. HUMANITARIAN CONCERNS AND NATIONAL INTERESTS In addition to bifurcating international society into civilised and uncivilised zones, the concept of humanitarian intervention raises a number of additional questions. A major problem emerges from the fact that the new interventionary logic ‘presupposes the existence of a meaningful international community in whose name intervention may be carried out’.15 This assumption raises a host of important issues that need to be addressed. The most fundamental of these relates to the mechanism through which the will of the international community to intervene is determined. In other words, as Lyons and Mastanduno put it, ‘The important question is, who determines that a state has not met its sovereign obligations and that the consequences are such that intervention to force compliance is justified.’16 However, one cannot even begin to address this issue without noting the fact that we operate in an international system in which the most important political and military decisions are taken not at the international but national level. It is, therefore, impossible to prevent considerations of national interest from intruding upon decisions regarding international intervention for ostensibly humanitarian purposes. This immediately complicates the problem of deciphering international will, for one is never sure whether decisions taken on behalf of the international community are truly the result of altruistic motives or are driven by the national interests of states that have a stake in intervening in particular crises or locales. On the question of the link between national interest and humanitarian intervention, advocates of intervention are caught between a rock and a hard place for two reasons.17 First, as past practice demonstrates, most states will not be inclined to undertake humanitarian intervention unless their national interests are directly or indirectly involved. Even if they commit themselves to intervene for altruistic and humanitarian reasons, in the absence of pressing national interest concerns they will normally not be in a position to sustain such a commitment when faced by human and material costs that their publics most likely will not be willing to pay. Past experience, above all the case of the U.S. intervention in Somalia in 1992–93, demonstrates that 61jhr06x.qxd 86 07/02/02 15:56 Page 86 T H E I N T E R N AT I O N A L J O U R N A L O F H U M A N R I G H T S the threshold of pain for states undertaking humanitarian intervention in which their national interests are not substantially involved will be low. Second, as long as decisions to undertake such interventions are primarily taken at the national level, national interest considerations, under one guise or another, are likely to determine states’ decisions to intervene or desist from such intervention. Despite Stanley Hoffmann’s exhortation that ‘The concept of “national interest” should be widened to incorporate ethical concerns,’18 decisions to intervene when taken by national decision-making bodies make humanitarian interventions immediately suspect. When one adds to this the fact that such interventions are undertaken on a selective basis and the same criteria are not applied uniformly and universally in every case, such interventions lose legitimacy and credibility in the eyes of many, if not most, members of the international system.19 Even as interventionist a UN Secretary-General as Kofi Annan has been forced to concede that ‘If the new commitment to intervention in the face of extreme suffering is to retain the support of the world’s peoples, it must be – and must be seen to be – fairly and consistently applied, irrespective of region or nation.’20 However, selectivity in humanitarian interventions seems to be inevitable. As staunch an advocate of humanitarian intervention as Thomas G. Weiss has been compelled to admit that as far as such interventions are concerned, ‘there can be no universal imperative. States will pick and choose.’21 It may be possible, as MacFarlane and Weiss assert, that as a result of humanitarian political activity the construction of national interest, especially in the case of liberal democracies, comes to include humanitarian concerns.22 However, there is the distinct possibility that such a humanitarian construction of national interest may run headlong at some point into the narrower and realpolitik construction of national interest. When this happens, more often than not the latter construction is likely to prevail for domestic political and economic reasons. Decisions to intervene, not to intervene, or to withdraw, will be made (as they have been made in the past) largely on the basis of strategic and economic considerations that may have little to do with humanitarian concerns even if they are justified with reference to such ideals. The impossibility of determining the predominance of humanitarian concerns in a state’s decision to intervene was responsible in large measure for the international condemnation of the Indian intervention in the former East Pakistan in 1971 and the Vietnamese intervention in Cambodia in 1979. A large majority of states had strong reservations about these interventions despite the fact that in the former instance at least 300,000 civilians had been killed and 10 million refugees had crossed the border into India as a result of the reign of terror let loose by the Pakistan army in what was then East Pakistan. In the latter case, Pol Pot had killed over one million of his countrymen and women in order to create a Cambodia of his dreams. However, it was clear in both cases that Indian and Vietnamese strategic interests were involved in these interventions because of existing hostile relations between India and Pakistan and between Vietnam and the Cambodian regime, respectively.23 The opposition to these two interventions among members of international society was, therefore, quite 61jhr06x.qxd 07/02/02 15:56 Page 87 F O R U M O N H U M A N I TA R I A N I N T E RV E N T I O N 87 strong despite the fact that the violations of human rights, including large-scale killings, in these two cases were of such an order that northern Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo and Haiti pale into insignificance before them. HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTIONS AND DOUBLE STANDARDS International society turned out to be more receptive to arguments in favour of humanitarian intervention during the early and middle 1990s. This happened to be the case even when obviously interested parties carried out such intervention for reasons whose connection with humanitarian concerns was rather dubious. This can be explained to a substantial extent by the unusual circumstances surrounding the fundamental transformation of the balance of global power that took place during the early part of that decade. Few states could muster the courage in the first half of the 1990s to point out to the lone superpower and the coalition it led that the altruism of their actions was suspect and that they were often guilty of double standards.24 Such double standards were particularly glaring in the case of the Middle East. They were most obvious in the case of the intervention in northern Iraq and the imposition of no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq. The treatment of Kurds in Turkey was hardly better than that meted out to their cousins in Iraq. However, no humanitarian intervention was ever contemplated in the case of Turkey, a NATO member and a key player in enforcing economic and military sanctions against Iraq. Moreover, as MacFarlane and Weiss have pointed out, This intervention [in northern Iraq] reflected the connection of NATO to Turkey and American antipathy to Iran dating from the overthrow of the Shah and the hostage crisis of 1979. The effects of these strategic impulses were evident in that the Kurds on the Turkish border were the primary focus of the intervention, although the majority of displaced Kurds were found not on the Turkish but on the Iranian border. These latter were receiving only 10 per cent of their assessed needs in April 1991. Although the crisis in Iran was 2–3 times as severe as that in Turkey, international assistance to Turkey was substantially higher.25 The impression that the national interests of major powers determine decisions regarding humanitarian interventions is strengthened by the fact that Military operations under chapter VII [undertaken for humanitarian purposes] are agreed largely on the basis of a calculus of shared interests or of tradeoffs among the five permanent members of the Security Council. In June 1994, for example, disparate interests resulted in separate council decisions to authorise interventions by the French in Rwanda, the Americans in Haiti, and the Russians in Georgia. Each of the three permanent members traded its vote for the favored intervention of the other in return for support of its own favored operation.26 61jhr06x.qxd 07/02/02 88 15:56 Page 88 T H E I N T E R N AT I O N A L J O U R N A L O F H U M A N R I G H T S In other words, decisions to intervene even when taken for ostensibly humanitarian purposes and within the framework of the UN Security Council were subject to bargaining among the major powers that engaged in quid pro quo to enhance their respective strategic and economic interests in their spheres of influence. DETERMINING INTERNATIONAL WILL Since humanitarian interventions are supposedly undertaken in order to enforce the will of the international community, such bargaining and selectivity led to the strong suspicion that the concept of ‘international will’ is being used as a fig leaf to hide motivations based on national interest. These misgivings cannot be allayed unless one addresses the issue as to how international will is defined and deciphered. It is clear that the definition of such will cannot be left to major powers or a dominant coalition of major powers especially when they may have special reasons to carry out particular interventions to suit their own political and strategic objectives. A mechanism that not merely is, but is also seen to be, transparent, fair, and broadly participatory must be established to determine international will. Such a mechanism is not present at the current time. Recourse to the UN Security Council for authorisation or endorsement is inadequate as a measure for determining international political will. This is the case primarily because of the lopsided composition of that body and the seemingly firm resolve of its permanent members to block the expansion of its permanent membership and prevent the distribution of permanent seats more equitably in geographic and demographic terms.27 The veto power wielded by its permanent members makes the Security Council even more suspect in terms of its ability to apply uniform criteria for intervention to all humanitarian crises that may arise in the future. This is so because it excludes the possibility of international intervention against the veto-wielding powers and their friends and allies. In short, since the veto power of the P-5 can be exercised to deny humanitarian relief and to prevent humanitarian intervention, it creates a visibly discriminatory system that brings into question the legitimacy of all humanitarian interventions sanctioned by the Security Council.28 Furthermore, even if one accepts for argument’s sake that the UN Security Council is the proper agency for authorising humanitarian interventions, this does not resolve the legitimacy problem for such authorised interventions. A major concern arises from the lack of control by the Security Council over interventions authorised by it and undertaken in its name. Many of these operations have been subcontracted to groups of states that set the military, and often political, objectives of such interventions thus raising doubts about their legitimacy if not their legality. Iraq and Haiti The decisions to intervene in northern Iraq and Haiti clearly raised qualms in many people’s minds that it was the UN Security Council to which a role had been allotted by the intervening powers rather than the other way 61jhr06x.qxd 07/02/02 15:56 Page 89 F O R U M O N H U M A N I TA R I A N I N T E RV E N T I O N 89 around. In the case of northern Iraq it could be argued plausibly that UN Security Council Resolution 688, which was used to justify forcible intervention by the United States, Britain and France, ‘did not specifically authorize the use of force, and the Secretary-General did not request it, although he did in the end acquiesce in the intervention’.29 That resolution, one could reason, was essentially hijacked by the intervening powers to punish Iraq and destabilise the Iraqi regime in the aftermath of the Gulf War. It was thus utilised as a substitute for the Allies’ unwillingness to use force during that war to overthrow Saddam Hussein. In the case of Haiti, the UN Security Council Resolution 940 of July 1994 authorised member states ‘to form a multinational force [and] to use all necessary means to facilitate the departure from Haiti of the military dictatorship’. This was a more unambiguous authorisation of the use of force than in the case of northern Iraq. However, the fact that the U.S. had a very strong motive in intervening in Haiti to stop the flow of Haitian refugees into the country raised doubts in the minds of many observers regarding the legitimacy of such intervention.30 These suspicions were reinforced by the fact that segments of the American foreign policy establishment [had] provided moderate to strong support to the de facto [military] government. For instance it has been credibly alleged that US intelligence personnel were involved in the formation and training of the FRAPH, a paramilitary group that was accused of some of the worst human rights violations under the Cedras regime.31 It was only when the flow of refugees into the United States became intolerable that Washington took the lead in putting pressure upon the UN to sanction intervention in Haiti. Rwanda The feeling that the U.S. was using double standards in the case of Haiti was strengthened by the realisation that refugee movements of a much higher order from Rwanda during the same year did not evoke a similarly strong interventionary response from the Security Council. This inaction was attributed to the fact that the U.S. was disinclined to support intervention in Africa in the aftermath of the debacle in Somalia. In short, in this view the successful intervention in Haiti and the humanitarian disaster in Rwanda were both related to the presence or absence of U.S. national interest concerns. The International Panel of Eminent Personalities set up by the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in 1998 to investigate the 1994 genocide in Rwanda endorsed this view. The panel came to the conclusion that Once the genocide began, the US repeatedly and deliberately undermined all attempts to strengthen the UN military presence in Rwanda [W]ith the genocide taking tens of thousands of lives daily, the Security Council chose to cut the UN forces in half at the exact moment they needed massive reinforcement. As the horrors 61jhr06x.qxd 07/02/02 90 15:56 Page 90 T H E I N T E R N AT I O N A L J O U R N A L O F H U M A N R I G H T S accelerated, the Council did authorise a stronger mission but once again the US did all in its power to undermine its effectiveness. In the end, not one single additional soldier or piece of military hardware reached the country before the genocide ended.32 The panel also concluded that the performance of other powers, especially France, was even worse. Bosnia The treatment meted out by the major powers, and by extension by the United Nations Security Council, to the recognised government of Bosnia during the early phase of the Bosnian crisis also created grave misgivings about the legality of several actions authorised by the Security Council in that country in the name of humanitarian intervention. In this particular case, the UN Security Council’s attempt initially to maintain impartiality between the Bosnian state and the Serb insurgents in that country clearly violated international law and the norm of state sovereignty once Bosnia had been admitted to UN membership. As a leading commentator pointed out, The Bosnian government expected, because Bosnia was a recognised member state, that the UN should protect its sovereignty against the Bosnian Serbs. Many Bosnians and Bosnian supporters believed that the principle of neutrality was totally inappropriate because it assumed a legal, military, and moral equality between them and the heavily armed Bosnian Serbs Simple logic told them that the UN’s neutrality meant it was in fact siding with the Serbs.33 The treatment of the Bosnian government more or less on par with the Serbian-supported Bosnian Serb insurgents continued until the massacre of Bosnian Muslims in the UN protected ‘safe haven’ of Srebrenica in the summer of 1995 forced the UN and the major powers to change track. A great deal of bloodshed in Bosnia could have been avoided had the Security Council acted on the basis of established norms and practices of international law and provided the much needed help to the Bosnian government under attack by rebels backed by Serbia instead of imposing an arms embargo on it. The embargo left the Bosnian state in a position of acute disadvantage against Serb forces equipped by Serbia, especially since the latter was in control of most of the equipment belonging to the Yugoslav army before the disintegration of the federation. As the involvement of Serbia in the Bosnian conflict, both in terms of the transfer of arms and military personnel, had been clearly established, the Security Council could have treated this case from the very beginning as one of aggression from outside Bosnia’s borders. International assistance to Bosnia could then have been rendered under the ambit of Chapter VII of the UN Charter. It would have also prevented the human tragedy of Bosnia epitomised by the Srebrenica massacre.34 61jhr06x.qxd 07/02/02 15:56 Page 91 F O R U M O N H U M A N I TA R I A N I N T E RV E N T I O N 91 CIRCUMVENTING THE SECURITY COUNCIL While controversy continues to surround UN-sanctioned interventions, the legitimacy of humanitarian interventions becomes even more suspect when they are undertaken without the authorisation of the Security Council. Kosovo is the primary case in point. The UN Security Council had voted unanimously in September 1998 to demand a halt to indiscriminate attacks against the civilian population in Kosovo. However, afraid that Russia and China would prevent the Security Council from authorising a military intervention in Kosovo to enforce this demand, NATO took the decision in October 1998 to intervene unilaterally and began its air operation against Yugoslavia in March 1999. As for NATO’s right to act without explicit UN authorisation, [NATO Secretary General] Solana argued that ‘it [NATO] is a serious organization that takes a decision by consensus among serious countries with democratic governments,’ implying this fact alone conferred sufficient legitimacy on the contemplated action.35 Despite the existence of a strong moral case for intervention in Kosovo, the lack of authorisation by the UN Security Council immediately made it suspect in the eyes of a large number of states in the international system. The Security Council, even if a flawed instrument, at least gave some degree of legitimacy to actions taken on behalf of the society of states. The Kosovo intervention not only ignored the Security Council, but its proponents and executors added insult to injury by continuing to proclaim that it had been undertaken on behalf of the international community.36 If generalised, this type of justification for intervention, either by a single power or by a multinational coalition, undertaken without proper authorisation and oversight by the Security Council, is likely not merely to confuse the discussion about humanitarian intervention but to discredit the very idea itself. It is likely to do so because such intervention is based on the unilateral arrogation by a state or a coalition of states of the right to speak and act on behalf of the international community and to represent international will when this is patently not the case. When such arrogation takes place as the preliminary but crucial step toward violating the fundamental organising principle of international political life – state sovereignty – it raises serious concerns in the minds of policy makers and analysts around the world. When it has the potential to be used as a precedent to justify other similar actions it clearly undermines international order. As Bruno Simma has argued, ‘[T]he decisive point is that we should not change the rules simply to follow our humanitarian impulses; we should not set new standards only to do the right thing in a single case. The legal issues presented by the Kosovo crisis are particularly impressive proof that hard cases make bad law.’37 The concept of sovereignty and the degree to which it can be exercised today may be contested. However, one cannot deny the fact that not merely the UN Charter but also the accumulated norms of international society create a distinct predisposition towards accepting sovereignty claims unless a very strong case can be made that these claims need to be overridden. In order to disregard the legal claims of sovereignty, there must be a clear and 61jhr06x.qxd 92 07/02/02 15:56 Page 92 T H E I N T E R N AT I O N A L J O U R N A L O F H U M A N R I G H T S demonstrated consensus on the part of a very large majority of states that such exceptional circumstances exist in a particular instance that they demand violation of the sovereignty norm. It must also be demonstrated that such violation is not being committed for ulterior motives by intervening states. Furthermore, it must be established clearly that the same yardstick will apply to all cases similar to the one in which intervention is sanctioned for humanitarian reasons. If the Kosovo case proves anything it is that the criteria for intervention must be very stringent, restrictive, and nondiscriminatory for such interventions to be considered legitimate. POTENTIAL FOR ABUSE The foregoing analysis brings up some very fundamental concerns that I harbour about humanitarian intervention in a world composed of sovereign states but where power is unequally distributed among them. First, given the disparity in power among states, humanitarian intervention has the strong potential of becoming a tool for the interference by the strong in the affairs of the weak, with humanitarian considerations providing a veneer to justify such intervention. This would be a throwback to a hyper-realist world that will no longer be undergirded by the norms of international society. This outcome must be avoided at all costs for it will be extremely derogatory to international order and is likely to create a Hobbesian ‘state of nature’ in the interactions of states with each other. In other words, the international system will revert to the state where it is merely a ‘system’ but no longer a ‘society’.38 Second, and equally important, the selective derogation of state sovereignty by the use or misuse of humanitarian intervention may end up detracting from the most essential instrument, the principle of sovereignty, that has been used for the maintenance of international order during the past four centuries.39 The principle of sovereignty has also contributed to international justice, even if modestly, by acting as a normative barrier against the predatory instincts of the more powerful states. Sovereignty has underwritten international order primarily by enshrining the doctrine of non-intervention in the internal affairs of states as an essential ingredient of international society. While this may not have prevented interventions in the past, it has acted quite effectively as a normative requirement by forcing potential or actual interveners to justify their actions before their sovereign, and legally equal, peers. Changing the normative yardsticks governing intervention (which have traditionally had a pronounced bias toward non-intervention) may end up doing more harm than good to international order in the long run. My third concern, and one very inadequately addressed in the debate about humanitarian intervention, is that state sovereignty, as a legal and normative concept, acts as the cornerstone for the only institutional architecture capable of providing order within territorially defined political communities. It goes without saying that the preservation of domestic order is essential for the maintenance of international order. But preserving domestic order is also essential for the attainment of other values, including human rights, that most 61jhr06x.qxd 07/02/02 15:56 Page 93 F O R U M O N H U M A N I TA R I A N I N T E RV E N T I O N 93 people hold dear. By eroding the legal basis of sovereign authority, humanitarian intervention, especially as practised during the past decade, may be opening the floodgates for domestic disorder. This, in turn, could negatively affect international order as well as the individuals’ most basic requirements for civilised existence. In the absence of domestic order one does not experience freedom but anarchy where the weak and the vulnerable (both within states and among them) are at the greatest disadvantage. One has only to have a passing acquaintance with Thomas Hobbes’s writings to realise the verity of this assertion.40 Furthermore, as recent experience has demonstrated, there is no institution other than the state that has the will or the ability to provide domestic order to societies. International organisations, NGOs, as well as external powers have all tried their hand at providing political order but have failed to do so. They have eventually been forced to re-establish institutions of state to perform this most fundamental task. The UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) had to hand over the reins of power to a Cambodian government although the latter’s legitimacy was less than completely established and its effectiveness was in question.41 In East Timor, the UN continues to face a conundrum because of the unwillingness or inability of the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) to hand over the substance of power to local authorities. As a result, it is increasingly alienating the local population and may find a revolt on its hands.42 In the absence of feasible alternatives, eroding the legitimacy and capacity of the state as an institution to provide order, even if it does so at times by the use of excessive force, usually turns out to be counter-productive. STATE MAKING AND VIOLENCE Finally, given the past record, it would appear that the likely targets of humanitarian intervention in the future would be new and weak states struggling to establish themselves as full-fledged members of the international system. It would be unrealistic to assume that they will be able to do so without the exercise of some violence. Such violence is, and will be, unavoidable, in light of the fact that new states, meaning those that have emerged since the end of World War II and form a majority of members of the international system, will continue to suffer for quite some time from the twin problems of incomplete state making and inadequate nation formation.43 Consequently, the coercive forces of the state may be frequently pitted against recalcitrant elements that refuse to accept the authority of the emerging state that is attempting to centralise power in its hands. Viewed through this prism it becomes clear that Kosovo was not so much an exception to the rule as a part of a historical trajectory that goes back several centuries to the founding of modern sovereign states in Western Europe. Those familiar with the history of Europe (or, indeed of the United States) will immediately recognise such violence as belonging to the same category of state making wars that Western and Central Europe experienced from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries and the United States did in the Civil War 61jhr06x.qxd 94 07/02/02 15:56 Page 94 T H E I N T E R N AT I O N A L J O U R N A L O F H U M A N R I G H T S of the 1860s and in its campaigns against native Americans. Such intrastate and interstate conflicts were then considered essential instruments for the imposition, maintenance, and legitimisation of political order. They serve much the same purpose now.44 Using such outbursts of violent conflict as justification for humanitarian intervention not merely defies the historical trajectory of state making but is likely to have major negative impact on the endeavour to impose and maintain domestic order. This is a subject that is under-explored in the literature on humanitarian intervention but deserves closer and fuller scrutiny. The bottom line is that a degree of violence is bound to accompany the state making and nation building process. Such violence is inescapable in light of the fact that political entities that emerged after World War II and, again, in the early 1990s after the demise of the Soviet Union and the disintegration of Yugoslavia have had no other option but to emulate the established states in terms of acquiring control over populations and territories. Where they have not been able to acquire such control, as in parts of sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia, they have remained the butt of international ridicule and suffer from permanent marginalisation in international affairs. Established international norms demand effective statehood from new states in a drastically shortened time frame compared to their European predecessors. At the same time, these states are subjected to a contradictory set of normative demands emanating from the international system, viz., that of civilised behaviour toward their populations, including those within their boundaries who oppose the dominant state making project. One wonders if West European and North American states would have successfully completed their state building endeavours and eventually emerged as liberal, democratic states, if they had the UN Human Rights Commission, Amnesty International and now the UN Security Council breathing down their necks during the crucial early phases of their state making endeavours. It is true, however, that international sensibility regarding human rights and their violations have changed quite radically during the past 50 years and this reality cannot be ignored. Therefore, a moral case can certainly be made regarding the need for humanitarian intervention and the violation of sovereignty that such intervention may necessarily entail. As one author has suggested, ‘[I]t would be extreme to suggest that sovereignty is absolute to the point of protecting the right of a state to carry out genocide, massive human rights violations, and generally terrorizing the population.’45 But, even in this changed normative context, one cannot neglect totally the imperatives of the state making process, especially since states continue to be the only providers of domestic order. Balancing the two demands, therefore, means that not only should the decision to intervene not be taken lightly, but also that there must be a transparent and legitimate mechanism through which such decisions are made on an impartial basis not affected by the national interest concerns of the intervening powers. For, once the latter is seen to happen the moral force of the humanitarian intervention argument will dissipate very quickly. 61jhr06x.qxd 07/02/02 15:56 Page 95 F O R U M O N H U M A N I TA R I A N I N T E RV E N T I O N 95 HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION AND CHAPTER VII In an attempt, however partial, to address this crucial issue of reconciling the demands of state sovereignty with the need for humanitarian intervention where there is irrefutable evidence of sustained and systematic violation of human rights, I would like to make the following two suggestions. First, I would like to argue strongly that humanitarian interventions should not be undertaken under the provisions of Chapter VII of the UN Charter because the circumstances that lead to such interventions usually do not fall within the ambit of threats to international peace and security as defined in that chapter. Much of the violence that usually prompts such intervention is intrastate in character. Even where there are cross border implications of such violence, usually in the form of refugees spilling over into neighbouring states, these do not normally fall in the category of interstate conflict or aggression by one state against another. It was certainly not the intent of the framers of the Charter to use Chapter VII provisions for purposes of intervention within the domestic jurisdiction of states. Chapter VII was intended to augment the sovereignty of states and protect them from external aggression and unwanted intervention, not to intervene in their domestic affairs. As such, humanitarian interventions subvert the very purpose for which the Chapter was written. Paradoxically, the use of Chapter VII has precluded the use of the UN as an instrument of intervention in certain cases where such action was likely to have been vetoed by one or more of the permanent members of the Security Council. Kosovo was the prime example of this type of intervention undertaken without the authorisation of the UN because of the inadequacy of Chapter VII in reconciling the P-5’s right to veto with the ostensibly altruistic intent of humanitarian intervention. Consequently, even a document as sympathetic to humanitarian intervention as the report by the Independent International Commission on Kosovo was forced to admit that ‘The intervention laid bare the inadequate state of international law. The intervention was not legal because it contravened the Charter prohibitions on the unauthorized use of force.’46 NEED FOR A NEW MECHANISM In light of these deficiencies it is clear that Chapter VII is not the proper mechanism for authorising humanitarian intervention. It is clear that in order to provide for such intervention the Charter must be amended and new articles included carefully listing the conditions under which humanitarian intervention can be considered permissible and the mechanism through which such intervention must be conducted. This means, above all that decisions regarding such interventions must be removed from the jurisdiction of the Security Council. A new more broadly based body, call it the Humanitarian Council if you will, must be created with adequate representation from all regions and with rotating membership reflecting the diverse composition of the United Nations. It should consist of at least 50 members, approximately a quarter of the total membership of the UN. Decisions to intervene for humanitarian purposes must require at least a three-quarters majority of the membership of 61jhr06x.qxd 96 07/02/02 15:56 Page 96 T H E I N T E R N AT I O N A L J O U R N A L O F H U M A N R I G H T S the proposed Council with no state having the right to veto such a decision. It must also be vested with oversight functions in regard to every intervention sanctioned by it. This oversight function should be exercised through the UN Secretary General who must report periodically to the proposed body. It is essential that the authority for undertaking humanitarian intervention be removed from the Security Council and vested in a larger and more representative body in order to provide the much needed legitimacy and credibility to such intervention. This becomes imperative because there is no sign that the P-5 will be willing to suspend their veto powers when it comes to dealing with humanitarian crises or to act with consistency regarding similar crises no matter where they develop around the world. Such a major amendment of the UN Charter may appear impossible to many advocates of humanitarian intervention who would consider it unrealistic and not adequately sensitive to the realpolitik considerations driving the policies of major powers. This, however, would demonstrate the internal inconsistency of their logic. For, decisions to intervene for humanitarian purposes are not supposed to be subject to the logic of realpolitik. If they are, then such interventions are not humanitarian in character. Eroding the normative basis of international society in order to provide major powers the facility to intervene selectively in the domestic affairs of weaker states should not be a part of the logic of humanitarian intervention. COMPLEX POLITICAL EMERGENCIES A transparent and participatory process will also allow the international community to clearly distinguish human rights violations by institutions of the state from ‘complex political emergencies’ that result primarily from state failure.47 In the former case, state elites use disproportionate force in order to promote their state and/or nation building project and bring dissent to a quick if violent end. In the process they violate the human rights of groups and individuals that are opposed to their state and nation building goals. A quick and definitive outcome, even if not always achieved, is clearly envisaged by the state elites perpetrating violence and violating human rights. In the case of ‘complex political emergencies’, state collapse leads, among other things, to the emergence of ‘conflict entrepreneurs’ who benefit from internal chaos and war and thus possess a vested interest in their indefinite, or at least prolonged, continuation.48 Their goal is, therefore, to perpetuate conflict rather than bring it to an end. This has led David Keen to point out that [I]nternal conflicts have persisted not so much despite the intentions of rational people, as because of them. The apparent “chaos” of civil war can be used to further local and short-term interests. These are frequently economic: to paraphrase Carl von Clausewitz, war has increasingly become the continuation of economics by other means. War is not simply a breakdown in a particular system, but a way of creating an alternative system of profit, power and even protection.49 61jhr06x.qxd 07/02/02 15:56 Page 97 F O R U M O N H U M A N I TA R I A N I N T E RV E N T I O N 97 A major reason for state collapse and the emergence of conflict entrepreneurs is related to the end of the Cold War. The superpowers lost interest in a large number of peripheral states, especially in Africa, that no longer served their strategic purpose. During the Cold War, client regimes had been supplied with external assistance by the superpowers to help them stay in power by buying off and/or suppressing domestic opponents. With the withdrawal of external support these regimes were confronted by strongmen whom they could neither purchase nor control. Consequently, as William Reno has made clear with regard to civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone, such conflicts, which often lead to state collapse, are ‘an outgrowth of the struggle between once dominant regimes and increasingly enterprising strongmen to control markets, both internally and externally, and convert that control into political authority.’50 In many cases, this results in the collapse of the state with various contenders fighting over its carcass primarily in order to attain external legitimacy that donning the mantle of the state provides to them. Liberia, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Congo/Zaire, among others, fall within this category of complex political emergencies that accompany state failure. Northern Iraq, Haiti and Kosovo certainly did not. It is interesting, however, that Great Power interest in intervening in the latter cases was of a much higher order than in the former. It also explains why ECOWAS’s intervention in Liberia and the UN mission in Somalia were far less controversial than the Security Council’s decision to authorise intervention in northern Iraq and the NATO intervention in Kosovo. The profusion of state collapse, or its likelihood, in sub-Saharan Africa explains to a considerable degree the greater acceptance of outside intervention in Africa as compared to other regions.51 Simultaneously, the low priority of that region in the strategic calculations of the dominant coalition as compared to Europe or the Middle East explains the relative indifference of the ‘international community’ to humanitarian crises in Africa. From the perspective of international society it is clear that the intervention in the two sets of cases distinguished above must be crafted in very different ways from each other, with the complex political emergencies deserving greater attention and more intense military involvement. Moral suasion, economic sanctions, and the equivalent of an international social boycott must be the instruments of first choice when dealing with states that routinely violate the human rights of their citizens. These tools are unlikely to work in the cases defined as complex political emergencies where states have collapsed or are about to do so. In the latter case, forcible, primarily military, intervention may be the only means available to provide essential goods and services to suffering populations as well as to bring the multiple perpetrators of terror to book. Humanitarian emergencies accompanying state failure are unlikely to pose the normative constraints on international intervention that the former would pose. In the absence of a recognisable sovereign authority, the question of violating state sovereignty becomes largely redundant. Therefore, the legal barriers for international action are drastically lowered. 61jhr06x.qxd 98 07/02/02 15:56 Page 98 T H E I N T E R N AT I O N A L J O U R N A L O F H U M A N R I G H T S These two ideal types of conflict do not exhaust all the scenarios in which international intervention may be demanded and/or considered. In fact, most concrete cases are likely to fall somewhere between the two ideal types and to possess characteristics that straddle the divide between them. Political leaders may attempt to use the state-making justification for purely predatory purposes à la Mobutu of Zaire. Alternatively, the use of excessive violence for state-making purposes may itself prompt state collapse, as for example in East Pakistan in 1970–71. The likely prevalence of cases that combine the characteristics of statemaking violence with those accompanying state failure makes it more imperative that decisions to intervene be taken by a body that is perceived to be genuinely representative of the international community and is considered to be largely impartial. Unlike the Security Council as it is currently constituted, such a body will be able to deliberate about complex cases transparently without being unduly influenced by the national interest considerations of major powers. Ad hoc decisions that lead to selective intervention and that are viewed as being linked to the national interests of major powers are likely to eventually discredit the very notion of humanitarian intervention as well as introduce greater disorder into international society. The future of international order may well hinge on the way we are able to resolve the tension between ‘international intervention’ and ‘state sovereignty’. In some cases, as those of state failure, such intervention may become a necessity. In others, a more prudent as well as non-discriminatory approach will be required. The demands for humanitarian activism and respect for state sovereignty can be credibly balanced only when decisions to intervene are taken by an institution that is representative and through a process that is transparent. These qualities are essential to provide international legitimacy for decisions to intervene in the internal affairs of states when such decisions are supposedly taken on behalf of the international community. In their absence suspicions will persist that it is the national interests of the powerful that dictate such decisions rather than the collective interests of the society of states. ORDER VERSUS JUSTICE Underlying the debate over humanitarian intervention and state sovereignty is the perennial problem of order versus justice in the international system. However, in this case the debate intertwines two levels of the order–justice problem. At one level, the demand for human rights, which usually provides the context and often the pretext for humanitarian intervention, can be seen as the claim of individuals and substate groups for justice pitted against the state’s claim that order comes prior to justice. The corollary of the latter claim is that as the sole dispenser of domestic order the state has the right to tailor the need for justice to the requirements of order. At another level, the defence of state sovereignty against the undue excesses of humanitarian intervention can be seen as the demand for justice by the weaker states against the stronger states’ proclivity to impose their 61jhr06x.qxd 07/02/02 15:56 Page 99 F O R U M O N H U M A N I TA R I A N I N T E RV E N T I O N 99 preferred view of international order on the weak in the name of justice within states. Moral and normative claims can and will be advanced in the name of justice at both levels. The trick is to balance these claims carefully so as not to detract severely either from fragile domestic orders or from an international order that itself continues to remain in uneasy equilibrium. The tension between state sovereignty and humanitarian intervention also brings to the fore the fundamental tensions between the Northern and Southern perspectives on order and justice in the international system. This tension can be summarised, with some risk of oversimplification, in the following manner: While the North is primarily interested in justice within states and order among them, the South is basically committed to order within states and justice among them. This divergence in the Northern and Southern perceptions of order and justice and the different realms to which they apply is intimately related to where the two groups are generally located in terms of their state-making odyssey and the technological, military and economic capabilities at their disposal. States at an earlier stage of state making and inferior in terms of capabilities are likely to defend their sovereignty zealously. Those states that are well established, i.e. possess unconditional legitimacy in the eyes of their populations, and more powerful are, on the other hand, likely to be more interventionist in their inclinations. They can be presumed to be more inclined to overrule the claims of state sovereignty, especially since they know that their own sovereign claims are unlikely to be challenged from within or superseded from without. The tension analysed in this article is, therefore, likely to remain with us for a long time to come. It will be resolved only when the newcomers to the international system succeed in establishing effective and legitimate states as well as in narrowing the power gap between them and the established states of the global North. In the meantime, the society of states will have to continuously grapple with this issue and balance the demands of the two sides in such a fashion that neither side’s basic commitment to the fundamental rules governing international society is eroded and the ‘global covenant’ endangered. Ignoring the power and perceptual gaps between the North and the South and working on the misleading assumption that a community of interests exists within the society of states as regards humanitarian intervention is likely to put international order at considerable risk. Both sides should remember that while order must be tempered by justice for it to attain legitimacy, the demand for justice when oblivious to the need for order can easily lead to anarchy. They should also realise that this applies to the condition within states as well as among them. NOTES 1. In my view the concept of international society is by definition pluralist in character. Take away the pluralism and the society no longer remains ‘inter-national’. For an elegantly presented contrary view that advances a solidarist notion of international society, albeit acknowledging pluralist restraints on international solidarism, see 61jhr06x.qxd 07/02/02 100 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 15:56 Page 100 T H E I N T E R N AT I O N A L J O U R N A L O F H U M A N R I G H T S Nicholas J. Wheeler, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). I would argue the opposite: that international society at the beginning of the twenty-first century continues to be essentially pluralist although there may be certain solidarist restraints imposed on its basic pluralist character. For a discussion of the fundamental characteristics of international society as well as the rules and norms governing it, see Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977). According to Robert Jackson, ‘The global covenant is the first attempt in world history to construct a society of states that operates with a doctrine of recognition and nonintervention that bridges different civilizations and cultures around the world.’ Robert Jackson, The Global Covenant: Human Conduct in a World of States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p.13. David P. Forsythe, Human Rights in International Relations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p.3. For a discussion of state failure and collapse, see I. William Zartman (ed.), Collapsed States: The Disintegration and Restoration of Legitimate Authority (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1995), especially chs. 1 and 17. For a powerful rendering of this argument, see Janice E. Thomson, ‘State Sovereignty in International Relations: Bridging the Gap Between Theory and Empirical Research’, International Studies Quarterly, Vol.39, No. 2 (June 1995), pp.213–33. Bendedict Kingsbury, ‘Sovereignty and Inequality’, in Andrew Hurrell and Ngaire Woods (eds.), Inequality, Globalization, and World Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p.86. See, R.J. Vincent, Nonintervention and International Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), p.331. For one authoritative expression of such sentiment, see the text of Kofi Annan’s statement to the UN General Assembly on 20 September 1999. The text is published under the title ‘Human Security and Intervention’ in Vital Speeches of the Day, New York, 15 October 1999. Jarat Chopra and Thomas G. Weiss, ‘Sovereignty is No Longer Sacrosanct: Codifying Humanitarian Intervention’, Ethics and International Affairs, Vol.6 (1992), pp.95–118. For example, see Francis M. Deng et al., Sovereignty as Responsibility (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1996). For details, see Gerritt W. Gong, The Standard of ‘Civilization’ in International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). Ibid., p.107. Kingsbury (note 7), pp.90–91. Gene M. Lyons and Michael Mastanduno, ‘Introduction’ in Gene M. Lyons and Michael Mastanduno (eds.), Beyond Westphalia? State Sovereignty and International Intervention (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p.13. Lyons and Mastanduno, ‘Introduction’ in Lyons and Mastanduno (ibid.), p.8. I do not intend to enter into the controversy in this article about how national interests themselves are defined, who defines them, etc. For the purposes of this article it will be assumed that national interests are those objectives articulated as such by authoritative spokesmen for the states on the basis of widely reflected consensus among the foreign policy and security communities within those states. Stanley Hoffmann, ‘The Politics and Ethics of Military Intervention’, Survival, Vol.37, No.4 (Winter 1995–96), p.29. Adam Roberts, ‘The Road to Hell : A Critique of Humanitarian Intervention’, Harvard International Review, Vol.16, No.1 (Fall 1993). See Kofi Annan, ‘Human Security and Intervention’ in Vital Speeches of the Day (New York: 15 October 1999. Thomas G. Weiss, ‘The Politics of Humanitarian Ideas’, Security Dialogue, Vol.31, No.1 (March 2000), p.20. 61jhr06x.qxd 07/02/02 15:56 Page 101 F O R U M O N H U M A N I TA R I A N I N T E RV E N T I O N 101 22. S. Neil MacFarlane and Thomas Weiss, ‘Political Interest and Humanitarian Action’, Security Studies, Vol.10, No.1 (Autumn 2000), pp.120–52. 23. For details of the two interventions and events preceding and following them, see Richard Sisson and Leo and E. Rose, War and Secession: Pakistan, India, and the Creation of Bangladesh, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990; and Nayan Chanda, Brother Enemy: The War After the War, San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986. 24. This point has also been made in connection with the selective use of the collective security argument. See Mohammed Ayoob, ‘Squaring the Circle: Collective Security in a System of States’, in Thomas G. Weiss (ed.), Collective Security in a Changing World (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1993), pp.45–62 25. MacFarlane and Weiss (note 22), p.136. 26. MacFarlane and Weiss (ibid.), p.137. 27. The Independent International Commission on Kosovo ‘concluded that additional UN reforms could address the growing gap between legality and legitimacy that always arises in cases of humanitarian intervention. The global credibility of the UN is undermined by the lack of representivity of the current structure of the UN Security Council. Expansion of the UNSC and of the permanent members will be an essential step toward regaining the credibility to maintain an effective role as guardian of world security.’ Independent International Commission on Kosovo, The Kosovo Report (Oxford University Press, 2000), p.291. 28. Richard Falk has summed up these reservations regarding the legitimacy of actions authorised by the Security Council in the following words: ‘Particularly confusing is the uncertainty regarding whether a Security Council decision involves a genuinely collective and community interventionary judgement guided predominantly by considerations of public good. Uncertainty clouds the degree to which such a decision is little more than a legitimating rationale for use of force that would otherwise be more widely viewed as “illegal” if undertaken by a state on its own or in coalition with other states.’ Richard Falk, ‘The Complexities of Humanitarian Intervention: A New World Order Challenge’, Michigan Journal of International Law, Vol.17 (Winter 1996), pp.492–3. 29. Francis Kofi Abiew, The Evolution of the Doctrine and Practice of Humanitarian Intervention, Kluwer Law International, Cambridge, MA, 1999, p. 153. 30. See, for example, Cynthia Weber, ‘Dissimulating Intervention: A Reading of the USLed Intervention in Haiti’, Alternatives, Vol.20, No.3 (1995), pp.265–78. 31. Chetan Kumar and Elizabeth M. Cousens, Policy Briefing: Peacebuilding in Haiti, New York: International Peace Academy, 1996), p.4. Accessed on the internet at: http://www.ipacademy.org/Publications/Reports/Research/PublRepoReseHaitPrint 32. OAU International Panel of Eminent Personalities to Investigate the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda and the Surrounding Events, Special Report, 7 July 2000, Executive Summary, p.7. Accessed on the internet at: http://www.oau-oua.org/Document/ ipep/report/ rwanda-e/EN-II-EX 33. Susan L. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution After the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1995), p.320. 34. For a powerful indictment of the UN’s imposition of an arms embargo on Bosnia and its policy of evenhandedness between the Bosnian government and Serbian insurgents, who perpetrated most of the human rights violations in Bosnia, see Haris Silajdzic, ‘Since the UN Can’t Protect Us, Lift the Arms Embargo’, New Perspectives Quarterly, Vol.12 (Summer 1995), pp.38–9. The author was the Prime Minister of Bosnia when this article was published. 35. Ivo H. Daalder, ‘NATO, the UN, and the Use of Force’, paper prepared for UNA-USA, March 1999, p.10. Accessed on the internet at: http://www.unausa.org/issues/sc/ daalder 36. For a perceptive discussion of the controversies surrounding the Kosovo intervention, see Nicholas J. Wheeler, ‘Reflections on the Legality and Legitimacy of NATO’s 61jhr06x.qxd 07/02/02 102 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 15:56 Page 102 T H E I N T E R N AT I O N A L J O U R N A L O F H U M A N R I G H T S Intervention in Kosovo’, International Journal of Human Rights, Vol.4, Nos.3/4, 2000, pp.145–63. Bruno Simma, ‘NATO, the UN and the Use of Force: Legal Aspects’, European Journal of International Law, Vol.10, No.1 (1999), accessed on the internet at: www.ejil.org/journal/Vol10/No1/ab1-2. For an authoritative discussion of the difference between a hyperrealist world which is confined to being a ‘system’ and one governed by norms and rules that establish, as well as symbolise, a ‘society’ of states or international society, see Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics, New York: Columbia University Press (1977), ch.1. See Alan James, ‘The Practice of Sovereign Statehood in Contemporary International Society’, in Robert Jackson (ed.), Sovereignty at the Millennium (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999), pp.35–51. For one perceptive interpretation of Hobbes as a theorist of domestic order, see Michael Williams, ‘Hobbes and International Relations: Reconsideration’. International Organization, Vol.50, No.2 (1996). For an evaluation of UNTAC’s achievements and failures, see Trevor Findlay, Cambodia: The Legacy and Lessons of UNTAC, SIPRI Research Report No.9 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). For a stringent critique of the UNTAET’s policies and actions by an insider, see Jarat Chopra, ‘The UN’s Kingdom of East Timor’, Survival, Vol.42, No.3 (Autumn 2000), pp.27–39. This assertion is based on the premise, borne out by historical analysis, that most cases of successful nation formation have been those where the state has been able to fashion the nation through the exercise of coercion as well as persuasion but, above all, by the very existence and resilience of state institutions within roughly the same boundaries over a considerable period of time. For a concise yet perceptive account, see Cornelia Navari, ‘The Origins of the Nation-State’, in Leonard Tivey (ed.), The Nation-State: The Formation of Modern Politics (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1981), pp.13–36. For details of this argument, see Mohammed Ayoob, ‘State Making, State Failure and the Revolution in Military Affairs’, in Gwyn Prins and Hylke Tromp (eds.), The Future of War (Boston: Kluwer Law International, 2000), pp.147–66. Frederick J. Petersen, ‘The Façade of Humanitarian Intervention for Human Rights in a Community of Sovereign States’, Arizona Journal of International and Comparative Law, Vol.15, No.3 (1998), p.882. Independent International Commission on Kosovo (note 27), p.290. For a review of the literature on state failure and interventions to reverse this process, see Tonya Langford, ‘Things Fall Apart: State Failure and the Politics of Intervention’, International Studies Review, Vol.1, No.1 (Spring 1999), pp.59–79. Jonathan Goodhand and David Hulme, ‘From Wars to Complex Political Emergencies: Understanding Conflict and Peace-Building in the New World Disorder’, Third World Quarterly, Vol.20, No.1 (February 1999), p.19. David Keen, The Economic Functions of Violence in Civil Wars, Adelphi Paper 320 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, London, 1998), p.11. William Reno, Humanitarian Emergencies and Warlord Economies in Liberia and Sierra Leone, Working Paper No.140 (UNU World Institute for Development Economics Research, 1997), p.2. According to one author, ‘During the same period [1990–96] when membership of the UN shot up by 16 per cent, primarily due to the dissolution of the Soviet Empire, over one-third of the total number of states in Africa alone have collapsed or are at risk ’ Karin von Hippel, Democracy by Force: US Military Intervention in the Post-Cold War World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p.2. The Responsibility To Protect december 2001 Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty III INTERNATIONAL COMMISSION ON INTERVENTION AND STATE SOVEREIGNTY Gareth Evans Co-Chair Mohamed Sahnoun Co-Chair Gisèle Côté-Harper Lee Hamilton Michael Ignatieff Vladimir Lukin Klaus Naumann Cyril Ramaphosa Fidel Ramos Cornelio Sommaruga Eduardo Stein Ramesh Thakur Published by the International Development Research Centre PO Box 8500, Ottawa, ON, Canada K1G 3H9 http://www.idrc.ca © HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN IN RIGHT OF CANADA 2001 as represented by the Minister of Foreign Affairs National Library of Canada cataloguing in publication data International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty The Responsibility to Protect Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty Issued also in French under title : La responsabilité de protéger. Issued by the International Development Research Centre. Accompanied by CD-ROM ISBN 0-88936-960-7 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. I. II. Intervention (International law). Sovereignty. National security. United Nations. Security Council. Pacific settlement of international disputes. International Development Research Centre (Canada) Title. JZ6368.I57 2001 327.1’7 C2001-980327-3 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the International Development Research Centre. Mention of a proprietary name does not constitute endorsement of the product and is given only for information. IDRC Books endeavours to produce environmentally friendly publications. All paper used is recycled as well as recyclable. All inks and coatings are vegetable-based products. The full catalogue of IDRC Books is available at http://www.idrc.ca/booktique. V TABLE OF CONTENTS FOREWORD ............................................................................................................................VII SYNOPSIS ................................................................................................................................XI 1. THE POLICY CHALLENGE..................................................................................................1 The Intervention Dilemma ..................................................................................................1 The Changing International Environment ..........................................................................3 The Implications for State Sovereignty ................................................................................7 The Meaning of Intervention................................................................................................8 2. A NEW APPROACH: “THE RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT” ......................................11 The Meaning of Sovereignty ..............................................................................................12 Human Rights, Human Security and Emerging Practice..................................................14 Shifting the Terms of the Debate ......................................................................................16 3. THE RESPONSIBILITY TO PREVENT ..............................................................................19 A Commitment to Prevention............................................................................................19 Early Warning and Analysis ................................................................................................21 Root Cause Prevention Efforts ..........................................................................................22 Direct Prevention Efforts ....................................................................................................23 4. THE RESPONSIBILITY TO REACT ..................................................................................29 Measures Short of Military Action ....................................................................................29 The Decision to Intervene ..................................................................................................31 Threshold Criteria: Just Cause............................................................................................32 Other Precautionary Criteria ..............................................................................................35 5. THE RESPONSIBILITY TO REBUILD ..............................................................................39 Post-Intervention Obligations............................................................................................39 Administration under UN Authority ................................................................................43 Local Ownership and the Limits to Occupation ..............................................................44 6. THE QUESTION OF AUTHORITY....................................................................................47 Sources of Authority under the UN Charter ....................................................................47 The Security Council’s Role – and Responsibility ............................................................49 When the Security Council Fails to Act ............................................................................53 The Responsibility to Protect VI 7. THE OPERATIONAL DIMENSION ..................................................................................57 Preventive Operations ........................................................................................................57 Planning for Military Intervention ....................................................................................58 Carrying Out Military Intervention....................................................................................61 Following Up Military Intervention ..................................................................................64 A Doctrine For Human Protection Operations ................................................................66 8. THE RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT: THE WAY FORWARD........................................69 From Analysis to Action ....................................................................................................69 Mobilizing Domestic Political Will....................................................................................70 Mobilizing International Political Will ............................................................................72 Next Steps ............................................................................................................................73 Meeting the Challenge........................................................................................................75 APPENDIX A: MEMBERS OF THE COMMISSION ..............................................................77 APPENDIX B: HOW THE COMMISSION WORKED ..........................................................81 INDEX ......................................................................................................................................87 VII foreword This report is about the so-called “right of humanitarian intervention”: the question of when, if ever, it is appropriate for states to take coercive – and in particular military – action, against another state for the purpose of protecting people at risk in that other state. At least until the horrifying events of 11 September 2001 brought to center stage the international response to terrorism, the issue of intervention for human protection purposes has been seen as one of the most controversial and difficult of all international relations questions. With the end of the Cold War, it became a live issue as never before. Many calls for intervention have been made over the last decade – some of them answered and some of them ignored. But there continues to be disagreement as to whether, if there is a right of intervention, how and when it should be exercised, and under whose authority. The Policy Challenge External military intervention for human protection purposes has been controversial both when it has happened – as in Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo – and when it has failed to happen, as in Rwanda. For some the new activism has been a long overdue internationalization of the human conscience; for others it has been an alarming breach of an international state order dependent on the sovereignty of states and the inviolability of their territory. For some, again, the only real issue is ensuring that coercive interventions are effective; for others, questions about legality, process and the possible misuse of precedent loom much larger. NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999 brought the controversy to its most intense head. Security Council members were divided; the legal justification for military action without new Security Council authority was asserted but largely unargued; the moral or humanitarian justification for the action, which on the face of it was much stronger, was clouded by allegations that the intervention generated more carnage than it averted; and there were many criticisms of the way in which the NATO allies conducted the operation. At the United Nations General Assembly in 1999, and again in 2000, Secretary-General Kofi Annan made compelling pleas to the international community to try to find, once and for all, a new consensus on how to approach these issues, to “forge unity” around the basic questions of principle and process involved. He posed the central question starkly and directly: …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? It was in response to this challenge that the Government of Canada, together with a group of major foundations, announced at the General Assembly in September 2000 the establishment of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS). Our Commission was asked to wrestle with the whole range of questions – legal, moral, operational and political – rolled up in this debate, to consult with the widest possible range of opinion around the world, and to bring back a report that would help the Secretary-General and everyone else find some new common ground. The Responsibility to Protect VIII The Commission’s Report The report which we now present has been unanimously agreed by the twelve Commissioners. Its central theme, reflected in the title, is “The Responsibility to Protect”, the idea 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. The nature and dimensions of that responsibility are argued out, as are all the questions that must be answered about who should exercise it, under whose authority, and when, where and how. We hope very much that the report will break new ground in a way that helps generate a new international consensus on these issues. It is desperately needed. As Co-Chairs we are indebted to our fellow Commissioners for the extraordinary qualities of knowledge, experience and judgement they brought to the preparation of this report over a long and gruelling year of meetings. The Commissioners brought many different personal views to the table, and the report on which we have agreed does not reflect in all respects the preferred views of any one of them. In particular, some of our members preferred a wider range of threshold criteria for military intervention than those proposed in our report, and others a narrower range. Again, some Commissioners preferred more, and others less, flexibility for military intervention outside the scope of Security Council approval. But the text on which we have found consensus does reflect the shared views of all Commissioners as to what is politically achievable in the world as we know it today. We want no more Rwandas, and we believe that the adoption of the proposals in our report is the best way of ensuring that. We share a belief that it is critical to move the international consensus forward, and we know that we cannot begin to achieve that if we cannot find consensus among ourselves. We simply hope that what we have achieved can now be mirrored in the wider international community. The Report and the Events of 11 September 2001 The Commission’s report was largely completed before the appalling attacks of 11 September 2001 on New York and Washington DC, and was not conceived as addressing the kind of challenge posed by such attacks. Our report has aimed at providing precise guidance for states faced with human protection claims in other states; it has not been framed to guide the policy of states when faced with attack on their own nationals, or the nationals of other states residing within their borders. The two situations in our judgement are fundamentally different. The framework the Commission, after consultations around the world, has developed to address the first case (coping with human protection claims in other states) must not be confused with the framework necessary to deal with the second (responding to terrorist attacks in one’s own state). Not the least of the differences is that in the latter case the UN Charter provides much more explicit authority for a military response than in the case of intervention for human protection purposes: Article 51 acknowledges “the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations”, though requiring that the measures taken be immediately reported to the Security Council. In Resolutions 1368 and 1373, passed unanimously in the aftermath of the September attacks, the Security Council left no doubt as to the scope of measures that states could and should take in response. The Responsibility to Protect IX While for the reasons stated we have not – except in passing – addressed in the body of our report the issues raised by the 11 September attacks, there are aspects of our report which do have some relevance to the issues with which the international community has been grappling in the aftermath of those attacks. In particular, the precautionary principles outlined in our report do seem to be relevant to military operations, both multilateral and unilateral, against the scourge of terrorism. We have no difficulty in principle with focused military action being taken against international terrorists and those who harbour them. But military power should always be exercised in a principled way, and the principles of right intention, last resort, proportional means and reasonable prospects outlined in our report are, on the face of it, all applicable to such action. Acknowledgements The research and consultations on which the Commission report is based, and the way in which we went about our task, are described in detail in the accompanying supplementary volume, titled “Research, Bibliography, Background”. We are indebted to former Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy, who initiated the Commission and chaired our Advisory Board, and to his successor John Manley who carried it through; to our Canadian support team, headed by Jill Sinclair and Heidi Hulan, for their boundless enthusiasm and energy; and to our research team, headed by Thomas Weiss and Stanlake Samkange, for their dedication and wise counsel. Our work has also benefited profoundly from that of many others who have researched and published on the many different issues on which this report touches, and we acknowledge that contribution more fully in the supplementary volume. We have not tried to reproduce in our report work which has been well and fully done elsewhere – for example on the subject of prevention or operational issues – but we are profoundly conscious of the many debts we owe. We particularly want to emphasize the benefit we derived from the series of lengthy roundtable discussions we conducted in Beijing, Cairo, Geneva, London, Maputo, New Delhi, New York, Ottawa, Paris, St Petersburg, Santiago and Washington. The meetings involved representatives from governments and inter-governmental organizations, from non-governmental organizations and civil society, and from universities, research institutes and think tanks – in all, over 200 people. These roundtable meetings proved to be a wonderfully rich source of information, ideas and diverse political perspectives, and an excellent real world environment in which the Commission could test its own ideas as they evolved. If we have in our report succeeded in breaking new ground, finding new and constructive ways to tackle the long-standing policy dilemmas associated with intervention for human protection purposes, there are a great many others who can justly claim a share of that success. GARETH EVANS MOHAMED SAHNOUN Co-Chairs 30 September 2001 XI synopsis THE RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT: CORE PRINCIPLES (1) Basic Principles A. State sovereignty implies responsibility, and the primary responsibility for the protection of its people lies with 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. (2) Foundations The foundations of the responsibility to protect, as a guiding principle for the international community of states, lie in: A. obligations inherent in the concept of sovereignty; B. the responsibility of the Security Council, under Article 24 of the UN Charter, for the maintenance of international peace and security; C. specific legal obligations under human rights and human protection declarations, covenants and treaties, international humanitarian law and national law; D. the developing practice of states, regional organizations and the Security Council itself. (3) Elements The responsibility to protect embraces three specific responsibilities: A. The responsibility to prevent: to address both the root causes and direct causes of internal conflict and other man-made crises putting populations at risk. B. The responsibility to react: to respond to situations of compelling human need with appropriate measures, which may include coercive measures like sanctions and international prosecution, and in extreme cases military intervention. C. The responsibility to rebuild: to provide, particularly after a military intervention, full assistance with recovery, reconstruction and reconciliation, addressing the causes of the harm the intervention was designed to halt or avert. (4) Priorities A. Prevention is the single most important dimension of the responsibility to protect: prevention options should always be exhausted before intervention is contemplated, and more commitment and resources must be devoted to it. B. The exercise of the responsibility to both prevent and react should always involve less intrusive and coercive measures being considered before more coercive and intrusive ones are applied. The Responsibility to Protect XII The Responsibility to Protect: Principles for Military Intervention (1) The Just Cause Threshold Military intervention for human protection purposes is an exceptional and extraordinary measure. To be warranted, there must be serious and irreparable harm occurring to human beings, or imminently likely to occur, of the following kind: A. large scale loss of life, actual or apprehended, with genocidal intent or not, which is the product either of deliberate state action, or state neglect or inability to act, or a failed state situation; or B. large scale ‘ethnic cleansing’, actual or apprehended, whether carried out by killing, forced expulsion, acts of terror or rape. (2) The Precautionary Principles A. Right intention: The primary purpose of the intervention, whatever other motives intervening states may have, must be to halt or avert human suffering. Right intention is better assured with multilateral operations, clearly supported by regional opinion and the victims concerned. B. Last resort: Military intervention can only be justified when every non-military option for the prevention or peaceful resolution of the crisis has been explored, with reasonable grounds for believing lesser measures would not have succeeded. C. Proportional means: The scale, duration and intensity of the planned military intervention should be the minimum necessary to secure the defined human protection objective. D. Reasonable prospects: There must be a reasonable chance of success in halting or averting the suffering which has justified the intervention, with the consequences of action not likely to be worse than the consequences of inaction. (3) Right Authority A. There is no better or more appropriate body than the United Nations Security Council to authorize military intervention for human protection purposes. The task is not to find alternatives to the Security Council as a source of authority, but to make the Security Council work better than it has. B. Security Council authorization should in all cases be sought prior to any military intervention action being carried out. Those calling for an intervention should 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. C. 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. The Responsibility to Protect XIII D. The Permanent Five members of the Security Council should agree not to apply their veto power, in matters where their vital state interests are not involved, to obstruct the passage of resolutions authorizing military intervention for human protection purposes for which there is otherwise majority support. E. If the Security Council rejects a proposal or fails to deal with it in a reasonable time, alternative options are: I. consideration of the matter by the General Assembly in Emergency Special Session under the “Uniting for Peace” procedure; and II. action within area of jurisdiction by regional or sub-regional organizations under Chapter VIII of the Charter, subject to their seeking subsequent authorization from the Security Council. F. The Security Council should take into account in all its deliberations that, if it fails to discharge its responsibility to protect in conscience-shocking situations crying out for action, concerned states may not rule out other means to meet the gravity and urgency of that situation – and that the stature and credibility of the United Nations may suffer thereby. (4) Operational Principles A. Clear objectives; clear and unambiguous mandate at all times; and resources to match. B. Common military approach among involved partners; unity of command; clear and unequivocal communications and chain of command. C. Acceptance of limitations, incrementalism and gradualism in the application of force, the objective being protection of a population, not defeat of a state. D. Rules of engagement which fit the operational concept; are precise; reflect the principle of proportionality; and involve total adherence to international humanitarian law. E. Acceptance that force protection cannot become the principal objective. F. Maximum possible coordination with humanitarian organizations. 1 1. THE POLICY CHALLENGE THE INTERVENTION DILEMMA 1.1 “Humanitarian intervention” has been controversial both when it happens, and when it has failed to happen. Rwanda in 1994 laid bare the full horror of inaction. The United Nations (UN) Secretariat and some permanent members of the Security Council knew that officials connected to the then government were planning genocide; UN forces were present, though not in sufficient number at the outset; and credible strategies were available to prevent, or at least greatly mitigate, the slaughter which followed. But the Security Council refused to take the necessary action. That was a failure of international will – of civic courage – at the highest level. Its consequence was not merely a humanitarian catastrophe for Rwanda: the genocide destabilized the entire Great Lakes region and continues to do so. In the aftermath, many African peoples concluded that, for all the rhetoric about the universality of human rights, some human lives end up mattering a great deal less to the international community than others. 1.2 Kosovo – where intervention did take place in 1999 – concentrated attention on all the other sides of the argument. The operation raised major questions about the legitimacy of military intervention in a sovereign state. Was the cause just: were the human rights abuses...
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Responsibility to Protect Doctrine - Outline
I. Introduction
II. Responsibility to protect doctrine
III. Principles for the responsibility to protect
A. The protection of its people with the state itself
B. International responsibility to protect
IV. Elements of the responsibility to protect
A. Obligation to prevent
B. Responsibility to react
C. Responsibility to rebuild


Running head: RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT DOCTRINE

Responsibility to Protect Doctrine
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RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT DOCTRINE
Responsibility to Protect Doctrine
Humanitarian intervention has been controversial both when it happens and when it
fails. Rwanda is one of the countries to experience the full horror of inaction in 1994 where
some of the members of the Security Council, as well as the United Nations Secretariat, knew
of the planned genocide. The available UN f...


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