Anne Orford, International Authority and the Responsibility to Protect

Abstract

Rwanda�s three-month 1994 genocide that killed 800,000 people was not prevented due to a failure of political will, not lack of military capacity. Then in Kosovo in 1999, NATO did take forceful action in the name of humanitarian intervention, but without UN authorization. Both incidents triggered legal and political controversies, as a consequence of which Secretary-General (SG) Kofi Annan pushed for a new doctrine which would allow the international community to take timely and effective action against humanitarian atrocities. In 2001 the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) formulated the innovative principle of the responsibility to protect (R2P)1 that spoke eloquently to the need to change the UN�s normative framework in line with the changed reality of threats and victims of the new century. Building on its report, in 2005, world leaders unanimously agreed that all states had the responsibility to protect people living in their territorial jurisdictions. Where governments were manifestly failing in their sovereign duty, the international community, acting through the UN, would take �timely and decisive� collective action to honour the international responsibility to protect people against atrocities. R2P is the normative instrument of choice to convert a shocked international conscience into effective collective action. It navigates the treacherous shoals between the Scylla of callous indifference to the plight of victims and the Charybdis of self-righteous interference in others� internal affairs. In 2011, Libya became the setting for the first application of the sharp edge of the new principle-cum-norm of the responsibility to protect through a UN Security Council-authorized international military intervention. While the military enforcement of the no-fly and no-drive zones by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies was mainly a successful application of R2P, it also generated considerable controversy over allegations that NATO exceeded the limitations set on the international intervention �