Outlook: Intervention,Sovereignty and the Responsibility to Protect: Experiences from ICISS

Abstract

This article highlights the main achievement of the Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS): the establishment of the foundations for a new normative and operational consensus on the role of military intervention for humanitarian purposes. Most significantly, the report moves beyond the political debates and conceptual histories surrounding the polarized notions of military intervention and state sovereignty, and introduces the concept of the `responsibility to protect' to bridge the polemical-political divide. This concept encapsulates the growing necessity for the norm of non-intervention to yield to the principle of international responsibility to protect foreign populations under threat of mass killings and ethnic cleansing, where these populations' governments are either complicit or ineffectual. The ideas contained in the report are based on a spectrum of philosophical principles relevant to different actors, from the more general principles of the responsibility to prevent conflict and to rebuild peace, to the more specific threshold criteria and cautionary principles - right authority and due process - to ensure the ethical legitimacy of intervention on the basis of the responsibility to protect. The article concludes with some reflections on the role of the UN and leading powers in the implementation of this framework, and the usefulness of the precautionary principle to avoid irreversible humanitarian atrocities.

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References

* Prof. Ramesh Thakur is Vice Rector of United Nations University, Tokyo. Three caveats should be noted about this article. First, it reflects the personal opinion of the author and does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations University. Second, it does not even purport to speak in the name of ICISS: only the consensus report of the commission does that. Third, it has nevertheless benefited enormously from the debates and discussions with the other members of the commission, and from the extensive reading material collected by the research team as background material to assist the commission's deliberations.

See also The Kosovo Report: Conflict, International Response, Lessons Learned, Report of the Independent International Commission on Kosovo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

and Gérard Prunier , The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).

3 The Responsibility to Protect: Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre for ICISS, 2001). The report is also available at http://www.iciss.gc.ca.

4 Clearly, as a commissioner, I am writing as a partisan advocate, not an independent critic.

5 The commission's own supplementary volume (see note 9 below) provides 16 pages of bibliographic entries under `Humanitarian Intervention' and `Sovereignty and Intervention', plus many more entries under specific case studies, including Kosovo and East Timor.

6 The co-chairs were Gareth Evans and Mohamed Sahnoun, the remaining ten commissioners being Gisele Côté-Harper, Lee Hamilton, Michael Ignatieff, Vladimir Lukin, Klaus Naumann, Cyril Ramaphosa, Fidel Ramos, Cornelio Sommaruga, Eduardo Stein and Ramesh Thakur. Their biographical data can be found in the report or on the commission's website (see note 3 above).

7 As is noted in the foreword from the co-chairs, `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'; see The Responsibility to Protect (note 3 above), p. viii.

8 Commission meetings were held in Ottawa (November 2000), Maputo (March 2001), New Delhi (June 2001), Wakefield, Canada (August 2001) and Brussels (September 2001). Round tables and consultative meetings were held, in chronological order, in Ottawa, Geneva, London, Maputo, Washington, DC, Santiago, Cairo, Paris, New Delhi, Beijing and St Petersburg.

10.

9 The Responsibility to Protect: Research, Bibliography, Background, Supplementary Volume to the Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre for ICISS, 2001).

11.

10 See Hideaki Shinoda , Re-Examining Sovereignty: From Classical Theory to the Global Age (New York: St. Martin's, 2000).

12.

11 Mohammed Ayoob , `Humanitarian Intervention and State Sovereignty: International Society and the Challenge of Human Rights', International Journal of Human Rights, forthcoming, 2002.

13.

See also Francis M. Deng , `Reconciling Sovereignty with Responsibility: A Basis for International Humanitarian Action', in John Harbeson & Donald Rothchild , eds, Africa in World Politics: Post-Cold War Challenges (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995), pp. 295-310.

14.

13 As the report puts it, `while there is not yet a sufficiently strong basis to claim the emergence of a new principle of customary international law, growing state and regional organization practice as well as Security Council precedent suggest an emerging guiding principle - which in the Commission's view could properly be termed “the responsibility to protect'”; The Responsibility to Protect (note 3 above), p. 15, para. 2.24.

15.

14 These are clearly derived from the just war doctrine. But because the doctrine is rooted in the Christian tradition, acknowledging its religious roots would not necessarily have been the wisest political decision. This is just one example, albeit an interesting one, of the clash of academic and policy cultures.

16.

and Nicholas Wheeler , Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 33-51.

17.

James Cameron , `The Precautionary Principle', in Gary P. Sampson & W. Bradnee Chambers , eds, Trade, Environment, and the Millennium, 2nd edn (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2002), pp. 287-319.

18.

17 This normative inconsistency is fatal to the moral majority proponents of coalitions of the willing. Yet it is an obvious flaw - so much so that one may question whether failure to address it reflects intellectual laziness or moral duplicity. Can an intellectually coherent or morally consistent argument be advanced for any one or several of the P-5 to lead such coalitions when faced with an actual or apprehended Security Council veto, if they are not prepared to give up the veto right?

19.

and Jayantha Dhanapala & Ramesh Thakur , `Let's Get Together Against Terrorism', International Herald Tribune, 4 June 2002.

20.

19 Remarks of Secretary-General Kofi Annan to International Peace Academy seminar on `The Responsibility to Protect', New York, 15 February 2002, author's notes of address.