ICISS report - International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect

The Responsibility to Protect 4
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, both created in 1993, and its sister
tribunals for Rwanda established in 1994 and Sierra Leone in 2001. The International
Criminal Court, whose creation was decided in 1998, will begin operation when 60 countries
have ratified its Statute. In addition to the new institutions, established ones such as the UN
High Commissioner for Refugees, and the ICRC and International Federation of Red Cross
and Red Crescent Societies, have been ever more active.
1.15 Nearly as significant has been the emergence, of many new non-state actors in international
affairs – including especially a large number of NGOs dealing with global matters;
a growing number of media and academic institutions with worldwide reach; and an increasingly
diverse array of armed non-state actors ranging from national and international terrorists
to traditional rebel movements and various organized criminal groupings. These new
non-state actors, good or bad, have forced the debate about intervention for human
protection purposes to be conducted in front of a broader public, while at the same time
adding new elements to the agenda.
New Security Issues
1.16 The current debate about intervention for human protection purposes takes place in
a context not just of new actors, but also of new sets of issues. The most marked security
phenomenon since the end of the Cold War has been the proliferation of armed conflict
within states. In most cases these conflicts have centred on demands for greater political
rights and other political objectives, demands that were in many cases forcibly suppressed
during the Cold War. Gone with the end of the Cold War was the artificial and often very
brutal check which Cold War politics imposed on the political development of many states
and societies – especially in the developing world and in the former Eastern Bloc. In many
states, the result of the end of the Cold War has been a new emphasis on democratization,
human rights and good governance. But in too many others, the result has been internal war
or civil conflict – more often than not with ugly political and humanitarian repercussions.
1.17 In other cases, conflict has been directed towards the capture of resources and towards
plunder. The weakness of state structures and institutions in many countries has heightened
the challenges and risks of nation building, and sometimes tempted armed groups to try to
seize and themselves exploit valuable assets such as diamonds, timber and other natural
resources, not to mention the raw materials of drug production.
1.18 These internal conflicts are made more complex and lethal by modern technology
and communications, and in particular by the proliferation of cheap, highly destructive
weapons which find their way into the hands, among others, of child soldiers. Many occur
in desperately poor societies, or societies where there is a single valuable commodity – like
oil or diamonds – which rapidly becomes the fuel which sustains a full-time war economy.
In these places, the state’s monopoly over the means of violence is lost, and violence
becomes a way of life with catastrophic consequences for civilians caught in the crossfire.
1.19 An unhappy trend of contemporary conflict has been the increased vulnerability of
civilians, often involving their deliberate targeting. Sometimes the permanent displacement
of civilian populations has been a primary objective of the conflict; there has also been
increasing concern about the deliberate use of systematic rape to provoke exclusion from a
group. Efforts to suppress armed (and sometimes unarmed) dissent have in too many cases
led to excessive and disproportionate actions by governments, producing in some cases
excessive and unwarranted suffering on the part of civilian populations. In a few cases,
regimes have launched campaigns of terror on their own populations, sometimes in the