ICISS report - International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect

The Responsibility to Protect 31
❏ Suspension of membership or expulsion from international or regional bodies,
and the loss this may entail not only of national prestige, but also of technical
cooperation or financial assistance countries may receive from such bodies, is
another increasingly used tool.
❏ Refusal to admit a country to membership of a body is a corollary of the foregoing
which has sometimes been employed to good effect.
THE DECISION TO INTERVENE
Extreme Cases Only
4.10 In extreme and exceptional cases, the responsibility to react may involve the need to
resort to military action. But what is an extreme case? Where should we draw the line in
determining when military intervention is, prima facie, defensible?
4.11 The starting point, here as elsewhere, should be the principle of non-intervention.
This is the norm from which any departure has to be justified. All members of the United
Nations have an interest in maintaining an order of sovereign, self-reliant, responsible, yet
interdependent states. In most situations, this interest is best served if all states, large and
small, abstain from intervening or interfering in the domestic affairs of other states. Most
internal political or civil disagreements, even conflicts, within states do not require coercive
intervention by external powers. The non-interference rule not only protects states and
governments: it also protects peoples and cultures, enabling societies to maintain the
religious, ethnic, and civilizational differences that they cherish.
4.12 The norm of non-intervention is the equivalent in international affairs of the
Hippocratic principle – first do no harm. Intervention in the domestic affairs of states
is often harmful. It can destabilize the order of states, while fanning ethnic or civil strife.
When internal forces seeking to oppose a state believe that they can generate outside support
by mounting campaigns of violence, the internal order of all states is potentially compromised.
The rule against intervention in internal affairs encourages states to solve their own
internal problems and prevent these from spilling over into a threat to international peace
and security.
4.13 Yet there are exceptional circumstances in which the very interest that all states have in
maintaining a stable international order requires them to react when all order within a state
has broken down or when civil conflict and repression are so violent that civilians are threatened
with massacre, genocide or ethnic cleansing on a large scale. The Commission found in
its consultations that even in states where there was the strongest opposition to infringements
on sovereignty, there was general acceptance that there must be limited exceptions to the
non-intervention rule for certain kinds of emergencies. Generally expressed, the view was that
these exceptional circumstances must be cases of violence which so genuinely “shock the
conscience of mankind,” or which present such a clear and present danger to international
security, that they require coercive military intervention.
4.14 Given this broad international agreement on the need, in exceptional cases of human
risk, for coercive military action across borders, the task is to define, with as much precision
as possible, what these exceptional circumstances are, so as to maximize the chances of
consensus being reached in any given case. What is the precise threshold of violence and