The "responsibility to protect" doctrine: revived in Libya, buried in Syria.

• Author: Nuruzzaman, Mohammed
• Position: COMMENTARY

NATO's military strikes on Libya, under UN Security Council Resolution 1973, to dislodge the Gaddafi regime is widely viewed as the "watershed moment" in the short history of the "responsibility to protect" doctrine, commonly referred to as R2P. Ardent supporters of this doctrine claim that the use of military force against Gaddafi to save Libyan lives was in line with the original spirit of R2P; the doctrine, they further claim, came of age with the defeat of Gaddafi forces through NATO's bombings. However, despite what the supporters argue, NATO's intervention in Libya has seriously undercut the R2P doctrine itself.

A critical look at how R2P was applied to Libya points to a political episode full of contradictions, giving rise to serious questions as to whether the use of force was consistent with the original R2P report, developed by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) in 2001, and whether the appropriate stipulations in related relevant documents, such as the 2005 UN World Summit Outcome Document and the 2009 report of the UN secretary-general, Implementing the Responsibility to Protect, were observed. A more serious question is whether NATO succeeded in protecting the civilian population or if it killed more Libyans by bombing civilian sites and cities held by Gaddafi forces.

After Libya R2P has stalled; it has not been used in Syria or Yemen where more egregious crimes against humanity were and are being committed. If R2P had come of age in Libya, it has certainly seen a tragic death with the Security Council's inability to initiate actions on Syria. The Council's inaction has come as no surprise and was not a shocking development. As a liberal humanitarian doctrine, R2P mixes up humanitarian causes with realpolitik on the global stage, promotes Western warmongering under a humanitarian umbrella, and ends up committing the very crimes against humanity that the doctrine purports to stop. This commentary examines the R2P-inspired military intervention in Libya, and specifically argues that the death of the R2P doctrine in Syria was made inevitable by Western abuses in Libya, and that the doctrine is doomed to a bleak future.

Responsibility to Protect: The Doctrine

The R2P doctrine is premised on the idea that sovereign states not only have the primary responsibility to protect their peoples, they also have a collective extra-territorial responsibility to protect populations from mass atrocities everywhere. If a particular state is unable or unwilling to stop or avert large-scale human sufferings resulting from internal armed conflicts or government repressions that state loses its sovereign immunity to external interference in order to protect its people. The ICISS report suggests three main types of responsibilities to protect: prevention, reaction, and rebuilding after intervention. It emphasizes prevention--that is addressing the root causes of internal strife that puts humans at risk--as "the single most important dimension" of R2P.

The controversial part of the ICISS report is its elaborate discussions on where and how military interventions to protect humans may be warranted and executed. It sees military intervention as a last resort in cases where large-scale loss of life and "ethnic cleansing" are threatened or actually occurring (Article 4.19 of the ICISS report). External intervention to avert such grave situations can be undertaken only after all diplomatic and non-military avenues to peacefully resolving the humanitarian crisis have been exhausted (Article 4.37). Article 6.14 places the burden of responsibility for R2P military intervention issues with the UN Security Council, while at the same time recognizing the Council's democratic deficiencies and "institutional double standards". The ICISS report thus hinges more on peaceful strategies to resolve impending humanitarian crises than supporting foreign armed interventions to fix foreign problems.

Clearly then, the theoretical significance of the R2P doctrine lies in initiating a paradigm shift from the hotly debated right of intervention, promoted in the 1990s by the concept and practices of humanitarian intervention in such places as Kosovo in 1999, to an obligation to intervene. Article 2.4 of the ICISS report says: "We prefer to talk not of a 'right to intervene' but of a 'responsibility to protect'". The report also re-conceptualizes sovereignty by reframing the traditional concept of state sovereignty to the idea of individual sovereignty. A state is thus seen as nothing but a collective political unit created and owned by its citizens. The debate then shifts from state...