‘Righting the Wrongs of Past Interventions: A Review of the Report

of the International Commission on Intervention and State

Sovereignty

Ian Williams

In September 2000, Kofi A. Annan posed a question to the Millennium

Summit of the UN. ‘If 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 affect every
precept of our common humanity?’.i At the time, most delegates were
unenthusiastic about finding an answer. The extreme view taken by North
Korea was that ‘The new concept of ‘humanitarian intervention’ was a grave
challenge to the supreme principle of respect for sovereignty in international
relations. Humanitarian intervention would distort relations so that the
strong wielded their power against the weak’ there was no justification
whatsoever for humanitarian intervention’. Otherwise, the usual suspects
showed the usual suspicion; China, Russia and Cuba among others
expressed the need for clear safeguards and Security Council authorization
to ensure that unilateral military action by the West did not abuse
humanitarian principles. The West, while happy to invoke the concept in
particular cases like Kosovo, or Iraq, were not desperately eager to see a
general principle enunciated that could apply to less expedient cases. The
concept of humanitarian intervention flew in the face of the founding
principle of the United Nations, which - despite the reference in the preamble
of the Charter to ‘We the Peoples’ – has always been national sovereignty
and a notion of equality that gives China the same vote as Nauru in the
General Assembly.
Shortly afterwards at the prompting of Lloyd Axworthy, the Canadian
Foreign Minister who had convened the Ottawa landmines conference, the
Canadian Government financed the establishment of an International
Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty.ii Canada has had an
intimate if not always happy relationship with UN operations. The most
controversial and bruising example being its experience in Rwanda.
Canadian General Romeo Dallaire who led the UN force in that country
became personally symbolic of the best traditions of UN peacekeeping, even
as his own military and UN headquarters epitomized all that was worst about
it.iii Canada’s commitment to UN principles and its own debate on the future
of intervention made it an ideal government to act as host for the
Commission. Three months before it was founded Axworthy had explained:

In the past, when the international community has decided to

intervene, its efforts have often been too late, its mandate
insufficient, its resources and commitment lacking. One could
argue that each case adds to our experience, and each time
we learn our lessons and further develop our capacity for
response. Unfortunately, the evidence does not support this
argument. The continued pitfalls of a system not quite ready,
not quite willing or not willing at all are the too-consistent
result. Secretary-General Kofi Annan raised the issues in 1999,
when he called for the international community to examine
these questions. Since then, the negative reaction of many
countries and timidity on the part of the Secretariat to push
the envelope have resulted in a loss of momentum.iv

Canada, he said, had advocated the establishment of an international

commission as a way of forwarding the debate surrounding these
fundamental questions. Announced to the UN General Assembly in
September 2000, the functional part of the Commission was co-chaired by
former Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans and the seasoned UN
diplomat Mohamed Sahnoun. The latter had considerable experience of how
military intervention can frustrate the slow track of political reconciliation
from his time as UN Special Representative in Somalia. They were backed by
Gisèle Côté-Harper (Canada), Lee Hamilton (USA), Michael Ignatieff
(Canada), Vladimir Lukin (Russia), Cyril Ramaphosa (South Africa) Cornelio
Sommaruga (Switzerland), Eduardo Stein (Guatemala) and Ramesh Thakur
(India). There was also an Advisory Board, originally chaired by Axworthy,
which included people such as Soledad Alvear, Hanan Ashwari, Robin Cook,
and Giorgos Papandreou. Ottawa bankrolled $1 million of the costs – the rest
was largely met by the Carnegie and McArthur Foundations in New York. A
week after announcing the launch of the Commission, Axworthy resigned as
Foreign Minister to take up an academic post at the University of British
Columbia, but the ministry continued to support the project, and he himself
remained as chair of the Advisory Board.

The Commission’s point of departure was to consider ‘when, if ever, it

is appropriate for states to take coercive — and in particular military —
action, against another state for the purpose of protecting people at risk in
that other state…[and] how and when it should be exercised, and under
whose authority’.v The final report, not surprisingly, reads like the work of a
committee, in which disparate views have sometimes been welded together.
However, while occasionally platitudinous about the role of the United
Nations, its healthy pragmatism and reference to the real and often sordid
world make it an important and worthwhile answer to Annan’s question. The
Commission went to major centres across the Globe to sound out local
opinions and their views were generally predictable by geography.
Unsurprisingly, academics at the roundtable in Beijing saw no reason to give
the idea of humanitarian intervention any credence at all, and the
rapporteur’s report from the roundtable (all the reports from the regional
meetings are on the Commission’s web site) concluded that:

It is clear that certain western powers have played with noble

principles to serve their own hegemonic interests…the
theorization of the doctrine of humanitarian intervention is
flawed in several respects…it lacks a legal basis. Nowhere in
 the UN Charter can one find a clause that permits using force,
except for national defense under Article 51 and for restoring
international peace as specified in Chapter VII. Using force for
moral or conceptual reasons is questionable and dangerous,
because such reasons are often controversial.

India, no slouch at attacking Western hegemony, and in general very

unhappy about the Kosovo intervention, had to reconcile its doctrinal
opposition with the fact that its intervention had ended mass atrocities in
East Pakistan in December 1971. On the other hand, few Indian scholars or
politicians frame their intervention to stem the influx of over ten million
Bengalis in these terms. Instead, as with many superficially obvious cases of
‘humanitarian intervention”such as Tanzania in Uganda or Vietnam in
Cambodia, they justify it as an act of self-defence.vi Nevertheless, the report
from the New Delhi meeting did not close the door completely on the idea of
unilateral action in cases of extreme human rights abuses. It concluded,
‘While protective and preventive intervention was preferable to humanitarian
intervention at all times, military intervention would, at times, become a
"necessary evil’, and though it would be attempted ‘with a trembling hand’,
it should, in some cases, be attempted nevertheless’. In St Petersburg, the
issue of UN safeguards was paramount, and that also tended to dominate
the other regional meetings in Ottawa, Geneva, London, Maputo, Santiago,
Cairo and Paris.

Most of the views – except perhaps the Chinese – appeared in the final
document, which concluded that there was an emerging consensus that the
‘international community has a responsibility to act decisively’ when states
fail in their responsibility to protect’.vii In discussions with people around the
world, the commission detected a ‘transition from a culture of sovereign
impunity to a culture of national and international accountability’.viii(sec
2:18) However, some members of the commission felt that the concept of
‘humanitarian intervention’ had already become shop soiled from overuse in
dubious circumstances and persuaded their colleagues that the appropriate
term should rather be ‘responsibility to protect’, hence the title of the final
document. In a similar critical spirit the Commission judiciously balances the
indisputable historical benefits of the general concept of national sovereignty
against the clear need for particular exceptions in the face of real or
threatened atrocities. It tried to provide a theoretical and ethical framework
for what had hitherto been ad-hoc decisions on intervention, beginning with
two basic principles:

A. State sovereignty implies responsibility, and the primary responsibility

for the protection of its people lies with the state itself.

B. Where a population is suffering serious harm, as a result of internal

war, insurgency, repression or state failure, and the state in question is
unwilling or unable to halt or avert it, the principle of non-intervention
yields to the international responsibility to protect.ix

It derives these principles from emerging practice in international law and

the powers of the Security Council, but then broadened its remit to include
the responsibility to prevent, to react and to rebuild afterwards. It then lays
down a set of pragmatic and ethical considerations to be taken into account
before military action should be considered, including ‘Right Authority’,
which of course is the United Nations and the somewhat more intangible
‘Right Intention,’ which it defines as meaning that “The primary purpose of
the intervention, whatever other motives intervening states may have, must
be to halt or avert human suffering’.x (See end of paper for the Principles)
The most important conclusion of the Commission, at the root of the
argument for intervention is that sovereignty, like most rights, also implies
duties. ‘Where a population is suffering serious harm, as a result of internal
war, insurgency, repression or state failure, and the state in question is
unwilling or unable to halt or avert it, the principle of non-intervention yields
to the international responsibility to protect’.xi Indeed, the report argues,
under international conventions, other states also have a responsibility to
act. This may seem obvious to ordinary people, but is it is a revolutionary
concept in diplomacy. When the UN was founded, its primary purpose was
‘to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war’, and the primary
method its members assumed was a mutual guarantee of the sovereignties
of its member states against invasion. Any fears of a global tyranny were
allayed with the principle of unchallenged national sovereignties and a polite
fiction of total equality (which was at once challenged by the granting of
vetoes to the five permanent members.) In the days when governments
declared wars, withdrew ambassadors and formally invaded each other’s
countries, that was a fairly reasonable proposition. Since then, the most
bloody wars have been internal, waged by rival political or ethnic groups
within nations – and all too often by the ‘sovereign state itself against its own
citizens, as in Rwanda, Central America or Kosovo. Indeed, when calling for
the Commission, Axworthy pointed out the rapidly increasing percentage of
civilian casualties in such conflicts. Since the members of the United Nations
have all subscribed to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and most
have signed various conventions on human rights this leads to an immediate
dichotomy: should the international community regard the rights of
sovereign states as inviolable, but the rights of individuals as broad and
unenforceable guidelines to be disregarded when inconvenient?
The Commission also draws attention to how the changing
circumstances of war have led many human rights groups, and even
individual politicians who spent the sixties to the eighties on an anti-war tack
to reappraise their stands. Many of them became strong advocates of
intervention to save lives, even military intervention. With a strong media
presence they have succeeded in pressuring governments to take action.
The tensions between the old and new views are of course most visible in the
United States, where both the military and much of the public are still
traumatized by the Vietnam War. Ironically, the Pentagon has come to the
same non-interventionist conclusion as the old left and spent much of this
time being aggressive only about its budget, but fighting a doggedly
defensive battle against US involvement. However, as a result of such public
pressures, and impelled by precedent, it is clear that the tolerance of the
international community for the abrogation of sovereignty involved in
humanitarian intervention has come a long way in the last decade, despite
the resistance from Moscow and Beijing. At the same time, it is encouraging
that the same international human rights groups who call for intervention
often also maintain a very critical scrutiny of the methods and results.
Understandable concern at civilian casualties during recent interventions
should not blind us to the vast improvement since the US carpet-bombed
Indo-China. An objective critic can deplore military incompetence without
necessarily seeing studied malevolence in recent military acts by US or allied
forces.

Methods and Means

Even while accepting the possibility of intervention, the Commission regards
military intervention as a final resort to be used only when all else has failed.
With the pragmatism that pervades the document, it also cautions that a
diplomatic version of the Hippocratic principle is applicable: first do no harm.
The military intervention should not cause more harm and casualties than
the evil, which it seeks to undo or prevent. The Commission, quite correctly,
stresses the need for preventive action and early warning. It stresses the
potential power of the Secretary General to place issues on the agenda of
the Security Council. It suggests an enhanced early warning capacity for the
UN. Previous efforts to do this were dismissed as ‘Two Fijian Officers
watching CNN,’ and it may well be better to rely on NGO’s and the media to
pressure governments. Certainly, even if Kofi Annan were to place issues
before the Council, they would not be acted on unless there were political
and public pressure for action.
That said, in its understandable caution to avoid military action, the
Report tends sometimes to be overcautious. For example, in relation to the
Bosnian and Kosovo interventions it states: ‘even when the goal of an
international action is, as it should be, protecting human beings from gross
and systematic abuse, it can be difficult to avoid doing rather more harm
than good’.xii Another analysis of these situations is that the harm was done
by lack of a credible threat to the perpetrators until very late in the situation
by which time Slobodan Milosevic had developed such a feeling of impunity
that he did not believe the threats from the diplomats until it was too late.
There is a fuzzy line between allowing for negotiations and mediations on the
one hand, and procrastination and evasion on the other. The wait and see
approach led to Srebrenica and Rwanda.
Of course a major problem is that the UN, as the Brahimi Report
candidly stressed, does not have the capability for serious military
interventions.xiii It relies upon voluntary contributions, laboriously cobbled
together from scores of member states. Even if could call upon them in a
timely way, old-style UN peace-keepers, token forces drawn from neutral
countries as guarantors of agreements and ceasefires, have neither the
strength nor conviction to cope with the dangerous situations that
humanitarian interventions can pose. We can take it as axiomatic that any
armed forces that are killing civilians on the scale necessary to invoke
outside intervention will not have many ethical scruples about killing UN
peacekeepers. Indeed, in Bosnia, even major military powers like the UK and
France lacked the force capability (and it must also be admitted, the political
will) for effective intervention. On the other hand, the British military were
more effective outside the UN command structure in Sierra Leone than they
could have been inside it. Even so, as the Commission cautions, doubtless
with the US predilection for bombing in mind, there can be too much force –
raising the need to ensure that ‘decent objectives are not tarnished by
inappropriate means’.xiv(Sec1:23)
This is, perhaps a bigger problem than it appears. The most effective
military operations under the UN flag have been ‘franchise’ operations, in
which states have been invited to undertake tasks. Beggars cannot be
overseers, and every such operation is likely to be tainted by the national
policies of the contributing states. For example, the change in the Bosnian
War owes more to changes in the British military and US capital than to any
conscious collective decision of the UN. Once the Gulf War began it was
Washington, not New York that called the shots.

Solutions
As the Commission says, in an ideal world, the final arbiter would be the UN
Security Council, despite its clear flaws. To deal with some of those
problems, the Commission suggests that the five permanent members agree
not to use their veto ‘where their vital state interests are not involved’. xv
However, the US, if only for domestic political reasons, is unlikely to
relinquish the ‘proxy veto’ it wields on behalf of Israel, and in such
circumstances is hardly in a position to complain if Moscow does the same
for Belgrade, or Beijing for Burma. Perhaps realizing that the permanent
members are unlikely to adopt such a self-denying ordinance, the
Commission goes on to suggest the 1950 ‘Uniting For Peace’ formula of
referring issues to the General Assembly when the Security Council is
deadlocked. Ironically, even as the report was published, this was precisely
what the Palestinians were doing: and of course they met the problem that
the US veto is not just based, like that of the French or the British, on
atavistic legal powers, but on the harsh realities of the imbalance of power.
More than the two-thirds majority necessary passed a resolution in support
of the Palestinians – but in the real world of the UN there will be no
movement on its recommendations in the face of US defiance. xvi The
proposal that faced with a veto in the Security Council, it might be justifiable
to mount ‘action within area of jurisdiction by regional or sub-regional
organizations under Chapter VIII of the Charter, subject to their seeking
subsequent authorization from the Security Council’,xvii looks suspiciously like
a retrospective justification of the course of action in Kosovo. Even many
who supported the NATO action over Kosovo have strong reservations about
the Clinton administration’s refusal to even consider UN authorization for the
operation, which was based on the usual domestic policy considerations: not
least that since the Palestinians had taken to using the Uniting For Peace
procedure to by-pass the US veto, Washington was unable to give any
credibility to this method.

Conclusion
The report was not ready in time for the General Assembly of 2001, and
indeed, the Assembly itself was scuttled by September 11’s attacks not far
away. The deliberations of the Commission, it seems, will have to wait until
this year’s meeting. So what are its chances of implementation? Certainly
public opinion, media pressure and the inexorable expansion of the
precedents, has clearly extended the tolerance of the international
community and public opinion for the abrogation of sovereignty involved in
humanitarian intervention. Strangely enough, the biggest problem is likely to
be the state which in the real world has carried out more humanitarian
operations than any other, and the one that will certainly be called upon to
spearhead any future interventions: the United States. What better way
could there be to substantiate nations’ fears of any principle that erodes
sovereignty than the US administration’s claims to a right to intervene
unilaterally against ‘rogue states’ like Iraq while claiming unique exemptions
for its own citizens and forces against the International Criminal Court. It will
certainly colour any General Assembly debate on the issues this Autumn.
The Report needs much more publicity and its conclusions need much more
discussion, nowhere more so than in the US. However, it would be hopeless
optimism to expect any American administration, least of all this one, to
accept it in any substantial way, or to support any resolution based on it.
Ironically, American hostility could help make its concepts seem less tainted
to some worried member states! The balanced mixture of pragmatism and
the principle of ‘The Responsibility To Protect’ will certainly enhance the
debate and help the process of intellectual osmosis that has been gradually
making humanitarian intervention a more acceptable concept. However it is
unlikely to be adopted in any formal way in the near future, even if its
principles are used as a gauge for future proposed interventions.
BOX

SYNOPSIS of the Responsibility to Protect

THE RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT: CORE PRINCIPLES

(1) Basic Principles

C. State sovereignty implies responsibility, and the primary responsibility

for the protection of its people lies with the state itself.

D. Where a population is suffering serious harm, as a result of internal

war, insurgency, repression or state failure, and the state in question is
unwilling or unable to halt or avert it, the principle of non-intervention
yields to the international responsibility to protect.

(2) Foundations

The foundations of the responsibility to protect, as a guiding principle for the

international community of states, lie in:

A. obligations inherent in the concept of sovereignty;

B. the responsibility of the Security Council, under Article 24 of the UN

Charter, for the maintenance of international peace and security;

C. specific legal obligations under human rights and human protection

declarations, covenants and treaties, international humanitarian law
and national law;

D. the developing practice of states, regional organizations and the

Security Council itself.

(3) Elements

The responsibility to protect embraces three specific responsibilities:

 A. The responsibility to prevent: to address both the root causes and
direct causes of internal conflict and other man-made crises putting
populations at risk.

B. The responsibility to react: to respond to situations of compelling

human need with appropriate measures, which may include coercive
measures like sanctions and international prosecution, and in extreme
cases military intervention.

C. The responsibility to rebuild: to provide, particularly after a military

intervention, full assistance with recovery, reconstruction and
reconciliation, addressing the causes of the harm the intervention was
designed to halt or avert.

(4) Priorities

A. Prevention is the single most important dimension of the

responsibility to protect: prevention options should always be
exhausted before intervention is contemplated, and more commitment
and resources must be devoted to it.

B. The exercise of the responsibility to both prevent and react should

always involve less intrusive and coercive measures being considered
before more coercive and intrusive ones are applied.

The Responsibility to Protect: Principles for Military Intervention

(1) The Just Cause Threshold

Military intervention for human protection purposes is an exceptional and

extraordinary measure. To be warranted, there must be serious and
irreparable harm occurring to human beings, or imminently likely to occur, of
the following kind:
 A. large scale loss of life, actual or apprehended, with genocidal intent
or not, which is the product either of deliberate state action, or state
neglect or inability to act, or a failed state situation; or

B. large scale ‘ethnic cleansing’, actual or apprehended, whether

carried out by killing, forced expulsion, acts of terror or rape.

(2) The Precautionary Principles

A. Right intention: The primary purpose of the intervention, whatever

other motives intervening states may have, must be to halt or avert
human suffering. Right intention is better assured with multilateral
operations, clearly supported by regional opinion and the victims
concerned.

B. Last resort: Military intervention can only be justified when every

non-military option for the prevention or peaceful resolution of the
crisis has been explored, with reasonable grounds for believing lesser
measures would not have succeeded.

C. Proportional means: The scale, duration and intensity of the planned

military intervention should be the minimum necessary to secure the
defined human protection objective.

D. Reasonable prospects: There must be a reasonable chance of

success in halting or averting the suffering which has justified the
intervention, with the consequences of action not likely to be worse
than the consequences of inaction.

(3) Right Authority

A. There is no better or more appropriate body than the United Nations

Security Council to authorize military intervention for human protection
purposes. The task is not to find alternatives to the Security Council as
 a source of authority, but to make the Security Council work better
than it has.

B. Security Council authorization should in all cases be sought prior to any

military intervention action being carried out. Those calling for an
intervention should formally request such authorization, or have the
Council raise the matter on its own initiative, or have the Secretary-
General raise it under Article 99 of the UN Charter.

C. The Security Council should deal promptly with any request for
authority to intervene where there are allegations of large scale loss of
human life or ethnic cleansing. It should in this context seek adequate
verification of facts or conditions on the ground that might support a
military intervention.

D. The Permanent Five members of the Security Council should agree not
to apply their veto power, in matters where their vital state interests
are not involved, to obstruct the passage of resolutions authorizing
military intervention for human protection purposes for which there is
otherwise majority support.

E. If the Security Council rejects a proposal or fails to deal with it in a

reasonable time, alternative options are:

I. consideration of the matter by the General Assembly in

Emergency Special Session under the "Uniting for Peace"
procedure; and

II. action within area of jurisdiction by regional or sub-regional

organizations under Chapter VIII of the Charter, subject to their
seeking subsequent authorization from the Security Council.

F. The Security Council should take into account in all its deliberations
that, if it fails to discharge its responsibility to protect in conscience-
 shocking situations crying out for action, concerned states may not
rule out other means to meet the gravity and urgency of that situation
— and that the stature and credibility of the United Nations may suffer
thereby.

(4) Operational Principles

A. Clear objectives; clear and unambiguous mandate at all times; and

resources to match.

B. Common military approach among involved partners; unity of

command; clear and unequivocal communications and chain of
command.

C. Acceptance of limitations, incrementalism and gradualism in the

application of force, the objective being protection of a population, not
defeat of a state.

D. Rules of engagement which fit the operational concept; are precise;

reflect the principle of proportionality; and involve total adherence to
international humanitarian law.

E. Acceptance that force protection cannot become the principal

objective.

F. Maximum possible coordination with humanitarian organizations.

Ian Williams is the author of ‘The UN For Beginners’ Writers and Readers
London and New York, 1995 and the ‘Alms Trade’ Unwin Hyman London
1989 and the UN correspondent for the ‘Nation’ (New York).
i
‘We the Peoples’, UN Secretary General’s Millennium Report, September 2000.
ii
‘The Responsibility to Protect’, Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State
Sovereignty (Ottawa, Canada, 2001). The full report and background are available at
http://www.iciss-ciise.gc.ca/
iii
There are numerous accounts of this tragic story, but one of the most compelling is L.R. Melvern,
A People Betrayed: the role of the West in Rwanda’s genocide (London: Zed Books, 2000).
Melvern’s book contains material from her interview with Dallaire.
iv
Speech to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
June 19, 2000.
v
‘The Responsibility to Protect’, VII.
vi
The story of this intervention is told in detail in Nicholas J. Wheeler, Saving Strangers:
Humanitarian Intervention in International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp.55-
78.
vii
‘The Responsibility to Protect’, p.75.
viii

ix
‘The Responsibility to Protect, XI
x
‘The Responsibility to Protect’, XII
xi
‘The Responsibility to Protect’, XI
‘The Responsibility to Protect’, XI
xii

Panel on United Nations Peace Operations to the Secretary-General, A/55/305 S/2000/809, 17

xiii

August 2000.
xiv

xv
‘The Responsibility to Protect’, XIII
xvi
Ian Williams, United Nations Report: Security Council Debates Use, Veto of Military Force to
Protect Human Rights, WRMEA.com, March 2002, at
http://www.wrmea.com/archives/march2002/0203056.html.

xvii
‘The Responsibility to Protect’, XIII