Re-energizing The Responsibility to Protect

Remarks to UN Group of Friends of R2P, Ambassador-level meeting briefing, Australian UN Mission, New York, 6 November 2024

When you served on the ICISS commission and worked towards the adoption of the Word Summit Outcome Document: what changes did you envision R2P bringing about within the international system and its capacity to protect populations from atrocity crimes?

We simply wanted to ensure that when genocide, ethnic cleansing or other crimes against humanity or major war crimes, the most conscience-shocking of all human rights violations, were being threatened or committed behind sovereign state borders – as had catastrophically been the case through much of the 1990s in Central Africa and the Balkans – the rest of the world would regard this not as nobody else’s business, but everyone’s.

The Commission’s objective in crafting our report and recommendations was not to create new international legal rules nor undermine old ones. Our intended contribution was not to international relations theory but political practice. We wanted to create new standards of international behaviour which states would feel ashamed to violate, compelled to observe, or at least embarrassed to ignore.

Above all we wanted to create consensus where none had previously existed, on the Security Council and elsewhere, between the global North and South as to how to react to these most shocking of all human rights violations. The North talked the talk, but only occasionally walked the walk, of ‘humanitarian intervention’; the South, given its long experience of imperial missions civilisatrices, was deeply hostile to any notion of the big guys having the right to throw their weight around militarily.

The achievement of ICISS was to establish new foundations for just that consensus. We did it by making four big conceptual shifts in our report:

• changing the language of the debate, with the ‘responsibility to protect’ being much less inherently abrasive than the ‘right to intervene’;
• emphasizing that multiple actors shared that responsibility, not just the big military players, as was the case with humanitarian intervention;
• strongly emphasising preventive strategies, not just reactive ones as was the case with humanitarian intervention;
• identifying and supporting a whole continuum of reaction measures, not just military ones, as was the case with humanitarian intervention, but including diplomatic isolation, and sanctions and embargoes, and threats of International Criminal Court prosecution; and
• insisting that the bar for any military intervention be set very high, with legality dependent on Security Council endorsement, and legitimacy dependent on satisfying clear prudential criteria, including proportionality and doing, on balance, more good than harm.

The World Summit Outcome document in 2005 achieved, rather miraculously in many people’s judgement, exactly the consensus we had hoped for by embracing all the crucial elements of our report. The negotiated language of the relevant paragraphs was a typical UN word salad, but one made much more digestible with Special Adviser Ed Luck’s inspired ‘Three Pillars’ clarifying formulation in the report he wrote for the Secretary-General in 2009. My only real disappointment with the document was that it did not (mainly because of opposition from the US, which was keen to preserve what I have described elsewhere as its ‘divine right to ad hocery’) specifically endorse a set of prudential criteria for the UNSC to apply before endorsing military intervention, which may have spared us some subsequent tears.

For all the failings that R2P critics have been keen to pounce on ever since, I passionately believe that the concept of R2P has shown itself capable of capturing genuine cross-cultural repulsion at the kind of atrocities which killed some 80 million people during the course of the 20th Century, of doing so in language which for most people is instinctively attractive, and creating consensus for action where none previously existed. It would be a tragedy now to succumb to the cynics and sceptics, to fail to see the continuing force of R2P as an energizing ideal, and abandon the aspiration to see it fully and effectively implemented in all its dimensions.

Over the last 20 years, what highlights can you identify regarding how R2P has been conceptualized, evolved, and implemented?

I have argued for years that the success or failure of R2P should be measured against the four big things that R2P was designed by its founders be: a normative force; a catalyst for institutional change; a framework for effective preventive action; and a framework for effective reactive action when prevention has failed. There is zero room for complacency [particularly in the post-truth, post-rationality, post-decency, Trumpian world we now inhabit.]. But there are positive things we can say on each of these fronts.

Normatively, as evidenced in annual General Assembly debates and multiple Security Council resolutions, ‘R2P’ still commands a degree of global acceptance and traction unimaginable for ‘humanitarian intervention’. Although many states are still clearly more comfortable with the first two pillars of R2P than they are with the third (which they too often associate solely with military intervention), and there will always be argument about what precise form action should take in a particular case, there is no longer any serious dissent evident in relation to any of the elements of the 2005 Resolution. I am particularly grateful for the role that you, the Friends Group, have played in achieving this.

Institutionally, real progress has been made in developing both national civilian and military response preparedness and international legal accountability mechanisms, with the ICC now clearly finding its feet and many new monitoring, investigating and evidence collection mechanisms being established. Institutionally, 61 countries and 2 regional organizations (EU and OAS) have now appointed an R2P Focal Point – a designated high-level official whose job is to analyze atrocity risk and mobilize appropriate responses – although I do worry that this has too often become a box-ticking rather than genuinely substantive enterprise Civilian response capability is receiving much more organized attention, as is the need for militaries to rethink their force configuration, doctrine, rules of engagement, and training to deal better with mass atrocity response operations.

Preventively, R2P-driven strategies have had a number of under-noticed successes, notably in stopping the recurrence of violence in Kenya, the West African cases of Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire and The Gambia, and in Kyrgyzstan, while volatile situations such as Burundi get recurring Security Council attention of a kind unknown to Rwanda in the 1990s.

Reactively, the final benchmark – ensuring effective response to atrocity crises actually under way – this is obviously at best still work in progress. There have been partial successes – more often involving diplomatic than military pressure – in Kenya, Côte d’Ivoire, Congo, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic, and initially at least, in Libya.

But also too many failures, not helped by the re-emergence of major power rivalry and obstruction in the Security Council, likely to be further now entrenched with the re-election of Donald Trump as US President. That said, neither China nor Russia have been totally hostile to the concept of R2P – with Russia even calling it in aid to try to justify its initial assaults on Georgia and Ukraine, so getting them to eventually return to a more consensual approach may not be a totally lost cause. Though it would help in this respect if the P3 could bring itself to acknowledge that it over-reached in Libya in 2011: that was when R2P’s champagne moment – the consensus decision of the Security Council to support military intervention to stop an imminent massacre in Benghazi – turned to dust with the very non-consensual decision of the US, UK and France to pursue not just civilian protection but regime change. That laid the seeds for the subsequent failure to effectively respond to atrocity crimes in Syria and too many other theatres since.

There will always be acute difficulty -- even without Putin, Xi Jinping and Trump in power – in getting Council agreement on the use of coercive military force. Given that such force has been misused in the past, and the stakes and risks are always so high, it is right that the bar for action here always be set very high. But it should not be set impossibly high, and there is a proposal to cut through the present paralysis, the Responsibility While Protecting’ concept that was put on the table by Brazil in late 2011, that in my judgement remains the most constructive of all the suggested ways forward.

The critical need for Friends of R2P is to continue to make the case that R2P is about much more than military intervention in the most extreme cases; that there simply is no other set of principles anyone can identify, using different terminology and concepts, and addressing both prevention and reaction, which is remotely capable of finding common ground between the global South and North, and energizing collective action; that it is not remotely helpful to duck away from even using ‘R2P’ terminology as too provocative, as some of the strongest original supporters of R2P are now, unhappily, showing some inclination to do; and, above all, to stay optimistic. Here as elsewhere, if you want to change the world for the better, you have to start by believing in the possibility of change, and never stop working to make it happen.