Whither the Responsibility to Protect? Humanitarian Intervention and the 2005 World Summit.

In the months immediately following NATO's contentious intervention in Kosovo, Kofi Annan reflected on the dilemma of humanitarian intervention. "On the one hand," he asked, "is it legitimate for a regional organization to use force without a UN mandate? On the other, is it permissible to let gross and systematic violations of human fights, with grave humanitarian consequences, continue unchecked?" (1) Annan challenged international society to avoid "future Kosovos" (cases where the Security Council considers action but is deadlocked about whether to intervene to prevent humanitarian crises from worsening) and "future Rwandas" (cases where the Security Council fails even to consider taking decisive action in the face of genocide, mass murder, and/or ethnic cleansing). (2) The challenge was taken up by scholars and political leaders, most notably by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), an independent panel partly funded by the Canadian government. In its report, The Responsibility to Protect, the ICISS insisted that the primary responsibility for protecting civilians lay with the host state and that outside intervention could only be contemplated if the host proved either unwilling or unable to fulfill its responsibilities. (3) After the publication of The Responsibility to Protect, (4) the ICISS's commissioners and supporters lobbied hard to persuade states to endorse the concept and to adopt it at the 2005 World Summit. They appeared to succeed. Paragraphs 138 and 139 of the summit's outcome document stated: