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December 1, 2002
REVIEW: Humanitarian Intervention
The responsibility for protecting the lives and promoting the welfare of citizens lies primarily with the sovereign state. However, there is a hiatus — a responsibility deficit — if a state proves impotent or disinclined to protect its citizens, or itself becomes the perpetrator of violence against its own citizens. Can the dereliction in responsibility by the concerned be vouchsafed to other nation(s) or international organizations such as NATO or the UN? If so, then by whom, under what authority, in what circumstances and subject to what procedural and operational safeguards?
The crises in Bosnia and Somalia in the early 1990s, Rwanda in 1994, and Kosovo in 1999 have intensified the debate among policy and decision makers, academics and NGOs about “humanitarian intervention” and its ethical, moral and legal implications for the international community.
The UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, in his report to the UN Millennium Assembly in 2000, challenged the international community to agree on some essential questions: when should such an intervention occur, under whose authority and how. In response to that challenge, the Canadian government established the independent international commission on intervention and state sovereignty (ICISS) in September 2000 to undertake a comprehensive study.
The report issued by the commission in December 2001 concedes that the “humanitarian intervention” and the “right to intervene” by one state into the territory of another is seen as threatening the sovereignty of states and so tends to deter states from addressing the issues involved. The commission therefore takes a different approach and develops the idea of the “responsibility to protect”, that is, sovereign states have a responsibility to protect their own citizens from avoidable catastrophe, but when they are unwilling or unable to do so, that responsibility must be borne by the broader community of states.
The report makes a “principled, as well as a practical and political, case for conceptualizing the intervention issue in terms of a responsibility to protect”. In doing so, the commission relies upon three principles: sovereignty, human rights, and human security. The report argues for reconceptualizing sovereignty in terms of responsibility as opposed to the more traditional notion of sovereignty as control.
This implies that the state, including its agents, is responsible for the welfare of its citizens and for its actions, both internally to its citizens and externally to the international community in the form of the UN.
Besides, the report points to an emerging norm of national and international accountability in human rights, specifying the Ottawa Convention on Landmines and the Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court as evidence of this trend. The third principle, the concept of human security, affirms a person’s right to live in a safe and secure environment and points to a state’s obligation to protect its citizens from both internal and external threats.
Specifically, “the fundamental components of human security” which include the security of people against threats to life, livelihood, personal safety and human dignity can be put at risk by external aggression. Factors within a country, including the “security forces”, can also undermine human security. The report suggests that a broader perspective of security should force states to perceive security not just only in terms of external threats, but more importantly in terms of the threats to health and welfare that many face on a daily basis.
The report offers four objectives to guide an approach to intervention based on the responsibility to protect. First, it is imperative to develop clear rules, procedures, and criteria for how and when to intervene. Secondly, military intervention is legitimate in particular cases when all other approaches and strategies have failed. Thirdly, military intervention should seek to minimize the human costs and infrastructural damage that occur following intervention. And last, intervention should help to eliminate the causes of conflict and support a more stable peace.
The remainder of the report focuses on these objectives, using and promoting three supporting responsibilities: a responsibility to prevent, a responsibility to react and a responsibility to rebuild.
Conjointly with the report, the ICISS has produced a supplementary volume of research to fill the “intellectual vacuum”. Thomas Weiss and Don Hubert jointly write this volume, with scholarly input from a group of international specialists. The volume provides a comprehensive summary of the essential political, ethical, legal and operational issues regarding sovereignty, intervention and prevention.
It also provides information about the humanitarian intervention before and after the cold war in different parts of the world. It contains nine research essays and an exhaustive thematic bibliography and it will be particularly useful to scholars.
The responsibility to protect: research, bibliography, background, supplementary volume to the report
International Development Research Centre, Ottawa
ISBN 0-88936-960-7 and 0-88936-963-1
110pp and 426pp. $15 and $40
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