ICISS report - International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect

The Responsibility to Protect 9
“Humanitarian” Intervention?
1.39 The Commission recognizes the long history, and continuing wide and popular usage,
of the phrase “humanitarian intervention,” and also its descriptive usefulness in clearly
focusing attention on one particular category of interventions – namely, those undertaken for
the stated purpose of protecting or assisting people at risk. But we have made a deliberate
decision not to adopt this terminology, preferring to refer either to “intervention,” or as
appropriate “military intervention,” for human protection purposes.
1.40 We have responded in this respect to the very strong opposition expressed by humanitarian
agencies, humanitarian organizations and humanitarian workers towards any militarization
of the word “humanitarian”: whatever the motives of those engaging in the intervention,
it is anathema for the humanitarian relief and assistance sector to have this word
appropriated to describe any kind of military action. The Commission has also been responsive
to the suggestion in some political quarters that use in this context of an inherently
approving word like “humanitarian” tends to prejudge the very question in issue – that is,
whether the intervention is in fact defensible.
1.41 We have taken the view from the outset that there is some virtue in anything which
may encourage people to look again, with fresh eyes, at the real issues involved in the
sovereignty–intervention debate. Beyond the question of “humanitarian intervention”
terminology, there is a rather larger language change, and associated reconceptualization
of the issues, which the Commission has also felt it helpful to embrace. It is to this – the
concept of “the responsibility to protect” – that we turn in the next chapter.