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The Responsibility To Protect: The U.N. World Summit and the Question of Unilateralism |
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Alicia L. Bannon [View as PDF]
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115 Yale L.J. 1157 (2006)
More than a decade after the world did nothing to halt genocide in Rwanda, and in the shadow of ongoing atrocities in Darfur, Sudan, the international community recently made a new commitment to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. The United Nations 2005 World Summit brought together representatives from more than 170 countries, including the United States. While largely reiterating previous international development and security goals, the Summit culminated with an agreement that the international community, acting through the United Nations, bears a responsibility to help protect populations from genocide and other atrocities when their own governments fail to do so. The agreement further announced a willingness to take "collective action" through the Security Council to protect populations if peaceful means prove inadequate.
The motivating force behind the agreement is the United Nations' past inaction in the face of grave atrocities, including genocide. At the conclusion of the World Summit, Secretary General Kofi Annan told the world's leaders: "[Y]ou will be pledged to act if another Rwanda looms." However, by describing the responsibility to protect in terms of U.N. action, the World Summit failed to address a critical issue: What can and should be done by individual states if the United Nations fails to fulfill its pledge? The answer to this question will inform the scope of permissible unilateral action, with implications for future humanitarian interventions and military actions.
This Comment argues that the Summit agreement strengthens the legal justification for limited forms of unilateral and regional action–including military action–if the United Nations fails to act to protect populations from genocide and other atrocities. The Summit agreement strengthens the justification for unilateral action in two main ways. First, the agreement affirms important limits on national sovereignty by recognizing a state's responsibility to protect its own citizens. Second, the agreement sets clear responsibilities for the international community when a country fails to protect its own citizens. In cases of U.N. inaction, would-be unilateral actors can point to an explicit failure to fulfill a duty.
However, the agreement only supports unilateral action in a narrow set of circumstances. First, the agreement is limited to a small set of extreme human rights abuses. Second, the agreement implies a hierarchy of actors and of interventions: Good faith U.N. action is privileged over unilateralism and peaceful action is privileged over violent means. Finally, the agreement limits the scope of intervention to the goal of protection. For these reasons, the U.S. invasion of Iraq could not have been justified using the Summit agreement.
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