The Responsibility to Protect is a doctrine born out of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty of 2000 which was held in response to the lack of coherent guidelines for humanitarian intervention. From Rwanda to Bosnia to Somalia to Kosovo, situations where humanitarian intervention could have potentially remedied the situation were handled poorly or no action was taken at all. The Responsibility to Protect came as an attempt to shift the global dialogue from the rights of states to intervene in the affairs of another state, to the responsibility states have to protect their citizens and how the international community should react if that responsibility is not met.[1]
The Responsibility to Protect doctrine (RtoP) frames sovereignty as a responsibility, not a right of states. The government's responsibilities include protecting its citizens from harm. RtoP says that if a government fails to provide protection or commits any sort of atrocity, from genocide to crimes against humanity within its own population, the international community not only has the right to intervene, but it has the responsibility to intervene.[2] Sovereignty no longer means that governments can operate in whatever manner they want toward their own citizens. In essence, the focus is shifted back toward the original goal of humanitarian intervention: civilian protection.
Already the tension between sovereignty and RtoP is apparent. Sovereignty is one of the major pillars of the international order and RtoP argues that, under certain circumstances, other states can violate one state's sovereignty. The principle of sovereignty as written in the UN Charter says that “all Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.”[3] Sovereignty is a staple of international law, and can only be violated if action is authorized by the UN Security Council or in self-defence, as stated in Article VII.[4] The UN's conception of sovereignty and legitimate uses of force are the two most important legal concepts used to analyse RtoP.
The Responsibility to Protect, however, is not legally binding. The Responsibility to Protect can still only be seen as an international norm. Scholars argue that RtoP is grounded in existing international law and is meant to be a guideline for how the relevant pieces of international law should be interpreted. While RtoP drastically alters the norms governing states legal obligations in the face of atrocity, it does not create any new international law.
In the international system, norms have the opportunity to become laws through codification in legally binding treaties or extensive adherence to a norm by states. Many argue that solidifying the legal obligations of RtoP in an international treaty would make RtoP more effective. A treaty could impose more concrete guidelines such as a definite trigger and prescription of acceptable actions. Most likely the main reason a legal definition has not emerged is political: governments fear they will be obligated to intervene against a state they favour or that a government's own state will be targeted for intervention.
Comparing and contrasting the cases of Muammar Ghadaffi's regime in Libya with the case of Bashar Al-Assad's regime in Syria offers an example of where RtoP, a doctrine designed to eliminate inconsistencies in the international response to atrocities, has proven too weak. The UN Security Council authorized intervention in Libya through resolutions 1970 and 1973 in 2011.[5] Libya is an example where the legal aspects and political climate aligned to allow for the implementation of RtoP. In the face of ideological divides of the UN Security Council (particularly Russia and China's anti-interventionist attitudes) and the requirement of unanimity, political considerations can easily undermine what is moral when considering authorizing the use of force. No permanent member used its veto in Syria and the states with the capability to take action were willing to because the situation in Libya was relatively straight forward.
While Libya was not particularly divisive politically, Syria has been a starkly different story. China and Russia have threatened to veto all resolutions authorizing intervention in Syria.[6] Beyond the unwillingness of China and Russia to authorize action, other major powers with the capability to intervene found the situation on the ground complicated. There was no strong, unified force for the international community to support and intelligence was difficult to obtain. The analysis by some is that Syria looks strikingly similar to the Rwandan Genocide in 1994; the exact event RtoP was designed to prevent from recurring.
What emerges from this is a question of whether immediately codifying the Responsibility to Protect as an international law actually solve the inconsistencies of implementation. As stated before, some of the benefits would be establishing a trigger for intervention and increasing the punishment for states that do not act. Most importantly, the current formulation of RtoP has clearly not solved the problems of intervention in the 1990’s, thus there is risk of the same problems recurring if the international community waits and hopes that the issues resolve naturally without any changes to RtoP. Critics, on the other hand, argue that because RtoP only reaffirms existing laws and creates nothing substantially new, codifying it as a brand new law would actually give it less force and legitimacy than if it continues to rely on its grounding in established international law.[7]
While it is true that the Responsibility to Protect is a strong political call to states, situations continue to arise where states fail to follow the RtoP doctrine. The only repercussions resulting from states' inaction unfortunately fall on the unprotected populations. Thus far, RtoP has been a somewhat-successful experiment at remedying the problems with humanitarian intervention in the 1990’s. However, there is a long way to go and the debate over the best way to increase compliance with the doctrine must continue. It seems as though occurrences of mass atrocities will not cease and, in response, the international community's moral obligation to halt atrocities must be realized and executed more completely and effectively.
[1] Evans, Gareth, and Mhamed Sahnoun. "The Responsibility to Protect." Foreign Affairs. N.p., Dec. 002. Web. Nov. 2014.
[2] Weiss, Thomas. “Military Humanitarianism: Syria Hasn’t Killed It.” The Washington Quarterly, 37:1, 7-20. 12 March 2014. Web.
[3] United Nations, Charter of the United Nations, 24 October 1945, 1 UNTS XVI
[4] Id.
[5] Pommier, Bruno. "The use of force to protect civilians and humanitarian action: the case of Libya and beyond." International Review of the Red Cross 93.884 (2011): 1063-1083.
[6] Weiss, Thomas. “Military Humanitarianism: Syria Hasn’t Killed It.” The Washington Quarterly, 37:1, 7-20. 12 March 2014. pg 13. Web
[7] Burke-White, William W. "Adoption of the Responsibility to Protect." (2011). Web