Redefining sovereignty and intervention. (The Responsibility to Protect- Book Review) Ethics & International Affairs - April 1, 2003 Joelle Tanguy The Responsibility to Protect, International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, 2 vols. (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 2001), 110 pp. (vol. 1), 426 pp. (vol. 2), free; available at www.idrc.ca . In his millennium report to the United Nations, Secretary-General Kofi Annan asked, "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 offend every precept of our common humanity? ... We confront a real dilemma. Few would disagree that both the defence of humanity and the defence of sovereignty are principles that must be supported. Alas, that does not tell us which principle should prevail when they are in conflict." (1) Annan's remarks force us to confront some uncomfortable facts: The fiftieth anniversary of the Genocide Convention was haunted by the shameful neglect of Rwanda. The Mogadishu fiasco, the cruel ambiguities of Srebrenica, the silence over Chechnya, and the confusions of the Kosovo intervention fed a contentious debate on the circumstances, authority, and means to intervene. Nonetheless, human rights and humanitarian discourses asserted themselves in international affairs throughout the 1990s: "Once synonymous with the defence of territory from external attack, the requirements of security today have come to embrace the protection of communities and individuals from internal violence." (2) After the Kosovo intervention, the UN legal counsel admitted that "there are those who declare that the legal framework involving the right of self-determination and respect for territorial sovereignty is now in disarray." (3) The traditional Westphalian concept of sovereignty could no longer provide guidance for such interventions, and the UN Charter itself is ambiguous, affirming both the primacy of human rights and the essentiality of state sovereignty. Annan commented, "It is not the deficiencies of the Charter which have brought us to this juncture, but our difficulties in applying its principles to a new era; an era when strictly traditional notions of sovereignty can no longer do justice to the aspirations of peoples everywhere to attain their fundamental freedoms." (4) The secretary- general stressed the need for a conceptual leap forward. In September 2000, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty took on the challenge to build a conceptual bridge between matters of intervention and state sovereignty. The twelve-member independent commission sought to conceive an alternative framework that would articulate dilemmas of interventions and forge some sort of consensus on when and how to intervene. Cochairs Gareth Evans and Mohamed Sahnoun orchestrated an extensive, worldwide consultation of scholars, policy-makers, and civic leaders that fueled the development of the final report, The Responsibility to Protect, which was published in December 2001. They also called on Thomas Weiss and Don Hubert to advise them and produce a companion volume of background research and bibliography, dealing with a broad range of conceptual, ethical, legal, political, and operational issues related to interventions. Steering clear of the paths that had paralyzed the debate on humanitarian intervention in the 1990s, the commission reframed its terms in an ingenious way. Rather than revisiting the "right to intervene," it reconceptualized sovereignty as the responsibility of a state to protect its vulnerable populations. If--but only if--it fails, the broader community of states must shoulder that responsibility. (5) In other words, rather than establishing the rights of the intervener, the commission tries to shift the discourse to focus on the rights of populations in need, while still affirming sovereignty as the primary principle, since the chief responsibility for protection still must lie with the state. Only when the state is unable or unwilling to exercise this sovereignty defined as a responsibility to protect does an international duty to save civilians in danger trump the rights of the sovereign state and does the principle of nonintervention yield to an international responsibility to protect. Some of the commission's findings may appear to be dead on arrival, as they came in the context of the current war on terrorism. Although the timing of the publication of The Responsibility to Protect has clouded its reception, much of the commission's reflections on the need to limit and codify the use of the costliest and thorniest tool in international relations--forcible action against a sovereign state--should have perennial value. And its concomitant stress on the responsibilities of prevention and rebuilding, as well as its recommendations inherited from the just war tradition, make it must-reading for those engaged in the debate on the ethics of the new war.