What is Responsibility to Protect?

The example of Syria, as many others before, casts doubts about what should the international comunity understand for sovereignty of states. Should the international community allow any government attack its own civilians?Should we act instead? 

The United Nations Charter was signed in 1945 regarding another concept of what in international law was understood as sovereignty, thus many of its articles reflect the importance of respecting the integrity of states as the only sovereigns and allow military intervention only in cases of international conflict.

Chapter VII of the Charter contains the cases in which the Security Council could allow the use of force in order to “maintain or restore international peace and security”(article 39 Charter), thus anything is said about internal conflicts that affect only one state. When we are not in front of an international conflict we can't apply these rules. 

That seems deceiving , specially because after the signature of this Charter the international community has witnessed situations where an international action was needed in order to protect civilians from their own government, however Chapter VII does not recognize the right of the UN Security Council to allow the use of force in these cases, even to protect civilians. 

But after the Cold War the UN Security Council allowed the use of force in order to address some of these threats supporting its position in the fact that certain intervention was legitimate since  human rights violations in these cases were also threatening international peace and security, some of the most important cases are the intervention in Iraq in 1991, the intervention in Somalia in 1992, and the intervention in the Former Yugoslavia in 1992 and in Rwanda in 1994, conflicts that we will adress in this blog in further posts.

But in 1999 the effectiveness of the UN model to face and finish off human rights threatens was called into question with the case of Kosovo, when the veto system of the UN Security Council blocked the possibility of allowing the use of force. Hence NATO intervened without a previous authorization of UN bypassing the international organization in order to protect the civilians.

      After these occurrences raised the necessity of a new concept of international intervention in cases where civilians needed to be protected from their own governments in their own countries. The Secretary General Kofi Annan challenged the states to lay out a new concept of national sovereignty. An ad hoc commission was created by Gareth Evans, with the consent of Canadian Foreign Minister Loyd Axworthy,  in order to face this challenge, it was calledthe International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS).

      The ICISS Commission came up with the Responsibility to Protect concept where the first responsibility of protecting the rights and lives of civilians relies on the sovereign state. But it set out  what happens in cases where the state fails in the responsibility to protect its own civilians or it is the own state the perpetrator of violence against them.

But, doesn't this concept clash with the concept of Sovereign States? 

The concept of R2P considers the sovereign state as the first actor responsible for the protection of its own citizens, and only if the state is unable or unwilling to protect their own citizens it arises the responsibility of other states to act in the place of the failing state. This idea is shown in the Basic principles stated in the ICISS report :

“State sovereignty implies responsibility, and the primary responsibility for the

protection of its people lies with the state itself.

 Where a population issuffering serious harm, as a result of internal war, insurgency,

repression orstate 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”

From the reading of these principles the first conclusion we reach is that the concept of sovereignty has some differences with the concept of sovereignty as it was understood by the time the Charter was written.

    Hideaki Shinoda  makes an interesting definition of sovereignty as a two-sided concept. On one hand we talk about internal sovereignty as the exclusive competence of the state to make decisions with regard to its territory and its citizens. On the other hand there is a external point of view defining sovereignty as the identity of the state on legal basis according to  international law, meaning the state as the solely owner of the capacity of representing its citizens in front of the international community and the right to hold an equality status with regard to the other states. 

Can this classical definition of sovereignty fit in the idea of sovereignty as the duty of the sovereign state to protect its civilians and as the right of international community to intervene whether the sovereign state fails in its duty?

With this question posed I finish this post, we will keep talking about this issue in future posts.