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19 Harv. Hum Rts. J. 289 (2006)
The Responsibility to Protect: From Document to Doctrine - But What of Implemlentation

handle is hein.journals/hhrj19 and id is 293 raw text is: THE RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT: FROM DOCUMENT TO DOC-
TRINE-BUT WHAT OF IMPLEMENTATION?
BACKGROUND
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 Re-
sponsibility to Protect (R2P).12 The core tenant of the R2P is that sovereignty
1. Thomas G. Weiss, The Sunset of Humanitarian Intervention? The Responsibility to Protect in a Unipolar
Era, 2 SECURITY DIALOGUE 135, 136 (2004).
2. Alex J. Bellamy, Responsibility to Protect or Trojan Horse? The Crisis in Darfur and Humanitarian Inter-
vention After Iraq, ETHICS & INT'L AFF., Summer 2005, at 31, 34; Martti Koskenniemi, The Police in the
Temple Order, Justice, and the UN: A Dialectical View, 6 EUR. J. INT'L LAw 1, 2 n.7 (1995).
3. See, e.g., S.C. Res. 751,   2, U.N. Doc. S/RES/751 (Apr. 24, 1992); S.C. Res. 814, $T 5-6, U.N.
Doc. S/RES/814 (Mar. 26, 1993).
4. See, e.g., S.C. Res. 788, U.N. Doc. S/RES/788 (Nov. 19, 1992).
5. See, e.g., S.C. Res. 929,   3, U.N. Doc. S/RES/929 (June 2, 1994).
6. See, e.g., S.C. Res. 940,   4, U.N. Doc. S/RES/940 (July 31, 1994).
7. See, e.g., S.C. Res. 1181, U.N. Doc. S/RES/1181 (July 13, 1998).
8. See, e.g., S.C. Res. 1244,   9, U.N. Doc. S/RES/1244 (June 10, 1999).
9. See, e.g., FRANCIS KOFI ABIEW, THE EVOLUTION OF THE DOCTRINE AND PRACTICE OF HUMANI-
TARIAN INTERVENTION 16-17 (1999); Martin Griffiths, lain Levine & Mark Weller, Sovereignty and
Suffering, in THE POLITICS OF HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION 33, 34 (John Harriss ed., 1995). Note
however, that the trend toward challenging the inviolability of state sovereignty was not nearly as new
as such commentary suggests. For example, in 1905, Oppenheim wrote about the appropriateness of
intervention upon state sovereignty in cases of great human suffering. L. F .L. OPPENHEIM, OPPEN-
HEIM'S INTERNATIONAL LAw, 1 PEACE 439-44 (Robert Jennings & Arthur Watts eds., 9th ed. 1992).
10. ABIEW, supra note 9, at 230.
11. The Secretary-General, We the Peoples: The Role of the United Nations in the Twenty-First Cen-
tury, ch. 4, at 48, delivered to the General Assembly, U.N. Doc. No. A/54/2000 (Apr. 3, 2000), available
at http://www.un.org/millennium/sg/report/full.htm.
12. Int'l Comm'n on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), The Responsibility to Protect: Report of

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