ICISS report - International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect

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8. THE RESPONSIBILITY
TO PROTECT: THE
WAY FORWARD
FROM ANALYSIS TO ACTION
8.1 This report has been about compelling human need, about populations at risk of
slaughter, ethnic cleansing and starvation. It has been about the responsibility of sovereign
states to protect their own people from such harm – and about the need for the larger
international community to exercise that responsibility if states are unwilling or unable to
do so themselves.
8.2 Past debates on intervention have tended to proceed as if intervention and state
sovereignty were inherently contradictory and irreconcilable concepts – with support for
one necessarily coming at the expense of the other. But in the course of our consultations
this Commission has found less tension between these principles than we expected. We
found broad willingness to accept the idea that the responsibility to protect its people from
killing and other grave harm was the most basic and fundamental of all the responsibilities
that sovereignty imposes – and that if a state cannot or will not protect its people from such
harm, then coercive intervention for human protection purposes, including ultimately
military intervention, by others in the international community may be warranted in
extreme cases. We found broad support, in other words, for the core principle identified in
this report, the idea of the responsibility to protect.
8.3 The most strongly expressed concerns that the Commission did hear in the course
of our year-long consultations around the world went essentially to the political and
operational consequences of reconciling the principle of shared responsibility with that of
non-intervention. These concerns were of three different kinds. They might be described,
respectively, as concerns about process, about priorities, and about delivery, with a crosscutting
concern about competent assessment of the need to act.
8.4 As to process, the main concern was to ensure that when protective action is taken, and
in particular when there is military intervention for human protection purposes, it is undertaken
in a way that reinforces the collective responsibility of the international community
to address such issues, rather than allowing opportunities and excuses for unilateral action.
The Commission has sought to address these concerns by focusing, above all, on the central
role and responsibility of the United Nations Security Council to take whatever action is
needed. We have made some suggestions as to what should happen if the Security Council
will not act but the task, as we have seen it, has been not to find alternatives to the Security
Council as a source of authority, but to make it work much better than it has.
8.5 As to priorities, the main concern was that attention in past debates and policy making
had focused overwhelmingly on reaction to catastrophe – and in particular reaction by
military intervention – rather than trying to ensure that the catastrophe did not happen
in the first place. The Commission has tried to redress this imbalance by emphasizing over
and again the integral importance of prevention in the intervention debate, and also by
pointing out the need for a major focus on post-conflict peace building issues whenever