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The Security Council's Role in Fulfilling the Responsibility to Protect

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 August 2021

Jennifer M. Welsh
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Abstract

The principle of the responsibility to protect (RtoP) conceives of a broad set of measures that can be employed in preventing and responding to atrocity crimes. Nevertheless, the UN Security Council remains an important part of the implementation architecture, given what the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty referred to as its authoritative position in international society as the “linchpin of order and stability.” As part of the roundtable “The Responsibility to Protect in a Changing World Order: Twenty Years since Its Inception,” this review of the Council's role in fulfilling its responsibility to protect advances two somewhat contrasting arguments about the original ICISS report. First, it suggests that the commissioners may have underestimated the Council's potential contribution, by concentrating on the authorization of coercive means to address crises of human protection. Over the past two decades, the Security Council has not only employed various diplomatic, political, and humanitarian measures to address atrocity crimes but also adjusted the purposes and practices of peace operations to advance protection goals and more subtly shaped discourses and expectations about state responsibilities for protection. However, I also argue that the willingness of the ICISS to identify potential alternatives to the Security Council when its members are paralyzed appears in retrospect to have been both bold and forward looking, in light of the Council's failures to act in a timely and decisive manner to protect amid crises and the contemporary realities of geopolitical rivalry. The article concludes by suggesting that future efforts to protect populations from atrocity crimes should focus not only on the herculean task of trying to change the behavior of P5 members of the Council but also on encouraging a new institutional balance between the Security Council and other intergovernmental bodies.

Keywords

responsibility to protect (RtoP)atrocity crimesUN Security CouncilInternational Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS)2005 World Summit Outcomemultilateralismuse of forceUN General AssemblyUniting for Peace
Type
Roundtable: The Responsibility to Protect in a Changing World Order
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , Summer 2021 , pp. 227 - 243
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs

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References

NOTES

1 For the purposes of this essay, I use the term “atrocity crimes” to refer to the four acts stipulated in paragraphs 138 and 139 of the “2005 World Summit Outcome” document—namely genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and ethnic cleansing. See United Nations General Assembly, “2005 World Summit Outcome,” A/RES/60/1, September 16, 2005.

2 The UN secretary-general's first report on the responsibility to protect, issued in 2009, elaborates three pillars for implementation. Pillar one refers to the primary responsibility of the state to protect its population from genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing; pillar two sets out the responsibility of the international community to assist states in fulfilling their protection responsibilities; and pillar three calls for collective action at the international level to protect populations when national authorities are “manifestly failing” to do so. See Ban Ki-moon, “Implementing the Responsibility to Protect: Report of the Secretary-General,” A/63/677, January 12, 2009.

3 For an overview of the Security Council's roles, powers, and key functions, see the introduction to Lowe, Vaughan, Roberts, Adam, Welsh, Jennifer, and Zaum, Dominik, eds., The United Nations Security Council and War: The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 1–60Google Scholar.

4 Reus-Smit, Christian, The Moral Purpose of the State: Culture, Social Identity, and Institutional Rationality in International Relations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 129–34Google Scholar.

5 International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), The Responsibility to Protect (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, December 2001), para. 6.9.

6 Ibid., paras. 6.8 and 6.14.

7 Roberts, Adam and Zaum, Dominik, Selective Security: War and the United Nations Security Council since 1945, Adelphi Papers 395 (Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, 2008)Google Scholar.

8 ICISS, Responsibility to Protect, para. 6.12.

9 UN General Assembly, “2005 World Summit Outcome.”

10 See, for example, the discussion in Thomas G. Weiss, Humanitarian Intervention (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 2007), p. 117.

11 See United Nations Secretary-General, High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenge and Change, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility (New York: United Nations, 2004).

12 Edward C. Luck, “Taking Stock and Looking Ahead—Implementing the Responsibility to Protect,” in Hans Winkler, Terje Rød-Larsen, Christoph Mikulaschek, eds., The UN Security Council and the Responsibility to Protect: Policy, Process, and Practice, Favorita Papers 01/2010 (39th IPI Vienna Seminar, Diplomatic Academy of Vienna), pp. 61–70, at p. 65.

13 For an analysis of the negotiations, see Alex J. Bellamy, Global Politics and the Responsibility to Protect: From Words to Deeds (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 21–25; and Murthy, C. S. R. and Kurtz, Gerrit, “Responsibility as Solidarity: The Impact of the World Summit Negotiations on the R2P Trajectory,” Global Society 30, no. 1 (2016), pp. 38–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 This sequence was followed in the case of ECOWAS (the Economic Community of West African States) action in Liberia in 1992. Subsequently, in Article 4(h) of the Constitutive Act of the African Union, the AU asserted “the right of the Union to intervene in a Member State pursuant to a decision of the Assembly in respect of grave circumstances,” and did not specifically indicate the need for Security Council authorization (African Union, Article 4(h), Constitutive Act of the African Union, Lomé, Togo, Gulf of Guinea, July 11, 2000). According to some legal scholars, this omission means that the Constitutive Act could change the traditional, hierarchical relationship between the Security Council and regional organizations (as outlined in Chapter VIII of the UN Charter). See, for example, Allain, Jean, “The True Challenge to the United Nations System of the Use of Force: The Failures of Kosovo and Iraq and the Emergence of the African Union,” Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law 8, no. 1 (2004), pp. 238–89Google Scholar.

15 Murthy and Kurtz, “Responsibility as Solidarity,” p. 39. These authors draw the terms “coercive” and “consensual” solidarism from Hurrell, Andrew, On Global Order: Power, Values, and the Constitution of International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 63–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 For an example of this form of critique, see Anne Orford, International Authority and the Responsibility to Protect (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

17 See Welsh, Jennifer M., “Norm Contestation and the Responsibility to Protect,” Global Responsibility to Protect 5, no. 4 (2013), pp. 365–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 For the most up-to-date list of Security Council references to RtoP, see the website of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect: www.globalr2p.org/resources/un-security-council-resolutions-and-presidential-statements-referencing-r2p/. According to the Global Centre, as of June 2021 the Council had made approximately ninety references to RtoP in its resolutions. This number has been challenged by some on the basis of its overly inclusive approach, which considers references to the broader concept of the “protection of civilians,” and not only the protection of populations from the atrocity crimes specified in the “2005 World Summit Outcome.” Using a more restrictive definition, the number of references would still reach at least fifty.

19 For further elaboration on why we should resist assessing RtoP solely on the basis of its capacity to generate military intervention, see Welsh, Jennifer M., “The Responsibility to Protect after Libya and Syria,” Daedalus 145, no. 4 (Fall 2016), pp. 75–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Alex J. Bellamy, The First Response: Peaceful Means in the Third Pillar of the Responsibility to Protect (Muscatine, Iowa: Stanley Centre for Peace and Security, December 2015), stanleycenter.org/publications/pab/Bellamy3rdPillarPAB116.pdf.

21 As an example, see Aidan Hehir, Hollow Norms and the Responsibility to Protect (Houndsmills, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

22 For analysis of how Council resolutions and presidential statements have related to the different pillars of RtoP in a series of cases between 2005 and 2018, see Genser, Jared, “The United Nations Security Council's Implementation of the Responsibility to Protect: A Review of Past Interventions and Recommendations for Improvement,” Chicago Journal of International Law 18, no. 2 (Winter 2018), pp. 420–501Google Scholar.

23 See, for example, Morris, Justin, “Libya and Syria: R2P and the Spectre of the Swinging Pendulum,” International Affairs 89, no. 5 (September 2013), pp. 1265–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bellamy, Alex J., “From Tripoli to Damascus? Lesson Learning and the Implementation of the Responsibility to Protect,” International Politics 51, no. 1 (January 2014), pp. 23–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Paris, Roland, “The ‘Responsibility to Protect’ and the Structural Problems of Preventive Humanitarian Intervention,” International Peacekeeping 21, no. 5 (October 2014), pp. 569–603CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hehir, Aidan, “Assessing the Influence of the Responsibility to Protect on the UN Security Council during the Arab Spring,” Cooperation and Conflict 51, no. 2 (November 2015), pp. 166–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 United Nations Security Council, Resolution 2139, S/RES/2139, February 22, 2014.

25 United Nations Security Council, Resolution 2165, S/RES/2165, July 14, 2014. Notably, this resolution authorized these actions without the need for consent from the Syrian government.

26 Jason Ralph and Jess Gifkins, “The Purpose of United Nations Security Council Practice: Contesting Competence Claims in the Normative Context Created by the Responsibility to Protect,” European Journal of International Relations 23, no. 3 (September 2017), pp. 630–53, at pp. 647, 641.

27 Genser, “The United Nations Security Council's Implementation.” The nine cases include the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Darfur, Blue Nile and South Kordofan, South Sudan, Syria, Yemen, North Korea, the Central African Republic, and Myanmar.

28 Ibid., p. 498.

29 “UN Response to Atrocities: A Conversation with Ambassador Gert Rosenthal and Mr. Charles Petrie” (event recording, panel discussion, Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, CUNY Graduate Center, New York, November 19, 2020), www.globalr2p.org/resources/panel-discussion-un-response-to-atrocities-a-conversation-with-ambassador-gert-rosenthal-and-mr-charles-petrie/.

30 ICISS, Responsibility to Protect, para. 6.21.

31 Justin Morris and Nicholas J. Wheeler, “The Responsibility Not to Veto: A Responsibility Too Far?,” in Alex J. Bellamy and Timothy Dunne, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Responsibility to Protect (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

32 The acronym ACT stands for Accountability, Coherence and Transparency. The ACT group is concerned with the broader theme of Security Council working methods, of which use of the veto is one component. At the time of writing, 120 member states of the UN have supported the code of conduct.

33 The three schemes for veto restraint put forward by France and Mexico, the Elders, and the ACT group of states are further explained and assessed by Bolarinwa Adediran in “Reforming the Security Council through a Code of Conduct: A Sisyphean Task?,” Ethics & International Affairs 32, no. 4 (Winter 2018), pp. 463–82.

34 At the time of writing, only France and the United Kingdom have publicly backed the ACT code of conduct.

35 As of September 2020, Russia had cast fourteen vetoes in relation to the Syrian conflict, while China had cast eight.

36 Jennifer Trahan, Existing Legal Limits to Security Council Veto Power in the Face of Atrocity Crimes (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

37 Dominik Zaum, “The Security Council, the General Assembly and War: The Uniting for Peace Resolution,” in Lowe et al., Security Council and War, pp. 163–68. Zaum also notes that Security Council members, over time, have become less likely both to invoke the procedure and to act on requests from the General Assembly under the Uniting for Peace resolution (General Assembly Resolution 377[V]).

38 Kofi Annan, quoted in ICISS, Responsibility to Protect, para. 6.22.

39 The only formal response was the adoption of a statement issued by the president of the Security Council stressing the “primary responsibility of the Myanmar government to protect its population.” United Nations Security Council, “Statement by the President of the Security Council,” S/PRST/2017/22 (statement presented at the UN Security Council, 8085th meeting, November 6, 2017), p. 1.

40 See Maja Brauer and Andreas Bummel, A United Nations Parliamentary Assembly: A Policy Review by Democracy without Borders (Berlin: Democracy without Borders, September 2020), www.democracywithoutborders.org/files/DWB_UNPA_Policy_Review.pdf.