ICISS report - International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect

The Responsibility to Protect 8
to be those most respectful of human rights. And in security terms, a cohesive and peaceful
international system is far more likely to be achieved through the cooperation of effective
states, confident of their place in the world, than in an environment of fragile, collapsed,
fragmenting or generally chaotic state entities.
1.35 The defence of state sovereignty, by even its strongest supporters, does not include any
claim of the unlimited power of a state to do what it wants to its own people. The Commission
heard no such claim at any stage during our worldwide consultations. It is acknowledged that
sovereignty implies a dual responsibility: externally – to respect the sovereignty of other states,
and internally, to respect the dignity and basic rights of all the people within the state. In international
human rights covenants, in UN practice, and in state practice itself, sovereignty is now
understood as embracing this dual responsibility. Sovereignty as responsibility has become the
minimum content of good international citizenship.
1.36 This modern understanding of the meaning of sovereignty is of central importance in
the Commission’s approach to the question of intervention for human protection purposes,
and in particular in the development of our core theme, “the responsibility to protect,” which
is introduced and explained in the next chapter.
THE MEANING OF INTERVENTION
Scope of the Concept
1.37 Part of the controversy over “intervention” derives from the potential width of activities
this term can cover, up to and including military intervention. Some would regard any application
of pressure to a state as being intervention, and would include in this conditional
support programmes by major international financial institutions whose recipients often feel
they have no choice but to accept. Some others would regard almost any non-consensual
interference in the internal affairs of another state as being intervention – including the
delivery of emergency relief assistance to a section of a country’s population in need. Others
again would regard any kind of outright coercive actions – not just military action but actual
or threatened political and economic sanctions, blockades, diplomatic and military threats,
and international criminal prosecutions – as all being included in the term. Yet others would
confine its use to military force.
1.38 The kind of intervention with which we are concerned in this report is action taken
against a state or its leaders, without its or their consent, for purposes which are claimed to
be humanitarian or protective. By far the most controversial form of such intervention is
military, and a great part of our report necessarily focuses on that. But we are also very much
concerned with alternatives to military action, including all forms of preventive measures,
and coercive intervention measures – sanctions and criminal prosecutions – falling short of
military intervention. Such coercive measures are discussed in this report in two contexts:
their threatened use as a preventive measure, designed to avoid the need for military
intervention arising (Chapter 3); and their actual use as a reactive measure, but as an
alternative to military force (Chapter 4).