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The Responsibility to Protect: Rethinking Humanitarian Intervention

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2017

Gareth Evans
Gareth Evans*
Affiliation:
International Crisis Group
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Abstract

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Type
Rethinking Collective Action: The Responsibility to Protect and A Duty to Prevent
Information
Proceedings of the ASIL Annual Meeting , Volume 98 , 2004 , pp. 78 - 89
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of International Law 2004

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References

1 Since this was written, “humanitarian intervention” has burst back into prominence in the context of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. As weapons of mass destruction failed to turn up, and evidence of Saddam Hussein’s links with terrorists failed to get stronger, defenders of the war were forced back to supporting it on straightforward humanitarian intervention grounds: Saddam’s gross mistreatment of his own people, which reached genocidal levels in his use of chemical weapons against Kurds in the late 1980s and his massacre of southern Shiites in the early 1990s. Opponents of the Iraq war have responded by saying this was not the real motive for intervention at the time and cannot credibly be claimed as such after the event. Moreover, they say, if it had been the real motive, it was not good enough to justify going to war when all other considerations were taken into account. With opinion as heated and divided as ever, it has become necessary all over again to try to untangle the issues.

2 We the Peoples: The Role of the United Nations in the 21st Century, Millenium Report of the Secretary-General of the United Nations 48 (Sept. 2000).

3 Secretary-General’s speech to the 54th Session of the General Assembly, Sept. 20, 1999.

4 The Nobel Lecture given by the Nobel Peace Laureate 2001, Oslo, Dec. 10, 2001.

5 The Responsibility to Protect, Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (91 pp with CD insert), plus Supplementary Volume, Research, Bibliography, Background (410 pp), IDRC, Canada, Dec. 2001. The Report and Supplementary Volume may be downloaded from the Commission Web site, at <http://www.iciss-ciise.gc.ca>.