The Responsibility to Protect

Abstract

Between 1990 and 1994, the United Nations Security Council passed twice as many resolutions as had been passed in the entire history of the United Nations ("U.N."),' as the notion of what constituted a "threat to international peace and security" under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter was expanded to include humanitarian concerns. 2 The decade following the end of the Cold War saw Security Council resolutions authorizing Chapter VII interventions in Somalia, 3 Liberia,4 Rwanda, 5 Haiti,6 Sierra Leone, 7 and Kosovo. 8 This led many to posit the emergence of a challenge to the assumed inviolability of state sovereignty.9 However, the interventions of the 1990s were inconsistent, lacking any coherent theory with which to justify the infringement of sovereignty in each case. 10 In his Millennium Report, Secretary-General Kofi Annan issued a challenge: "[I1f humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica-to gross and systematic violations of human rights that offend every precept of our common humanity?"'"I In December 2001, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty ("ICISS") published its response in a report entitled The Responsibility to Protect ("R2P"). 12 The core tenant of the R2P is that sovereignty