United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has described the wider implications of the UN’s involvement in Libya in the following terms: “Security Council Resolution 1973 affirms, clearly and unequivocally, the international community’s determination to fulfill its responsibility to protect civilians from violence perpetrated upon them by their own government”.

Determined advocacy of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) has been a hallmark of Ban’s first term as Secretary-General. Nevertheless, since 2005 when R2P was formally affirmed as part of a package of measures at the UN Reform World Summit, wider acceptance of the new political norm has been slow in coming. Clearly, Secretary-General Ban hopes that resolution 1973 will change the terms of debate.

The Responsibility to Protect doctrine rests on three pillars: (1) the primary responsibility of states to protect their own populations from the four crimes of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity; (2) the international community’s responsibility to assist a state to fulfill its protection obligations; and (3) the international community’s responsibility to take timely and decisive action, in accordance with the UN Charter, in cases where the state has manifestly failed to protect its population from one or more of the four crimes.

Prior to Libya, the international community had taken a few limited “R2P actions”, in response to other instances of mass atrocity crimes, for example, economic sanctions such as those imposed on the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe; or referring the Darfur situation to the International Criminal Court. However, Libya and resolution 1973 marks the first time that the Council has authorized coercive military force to protect civilians. It’s a new benchmark for utilizing R2P doctrine.

The transformative significance of R2P is its impact on traditional notions of national sovereignty. The ability of sovereign governments to take whatever actions they like, up to and including committing mass atrocity crimes on their own citizens, is constrained under R2P doctrine. The “international community” takes on new responsibility to assist states in preventing these crimes, and to protect civilians when protection measures fail.

A decade ago, the Canadian-sponsored International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty that elaborated the idea of a global responsibility to protect spelled out six criteria for deciding whether military action is justified: right authority, just cause, right intention, last resort, proportional means and reasonable prospects. The latter, “reasonable prospects”, is perhaps the most difficult to assess.

Even with these criteria, there can be differing interpretations of just how this doctrine should be applied. In the case of Libya, there are those who would have invoked an “R2P analysis”, and yet prescribed a different course of action. For some, diplomacy should have been given more time. For others, the extent of the alleged crimes against humanity prior to resolution 1973 had not yet risen to a level that warranted military intervention. In Libya it was the imminent threat of slaughter in Benghazi that led to such swift action by the Security Council.

If resolution 1973 brings renewed attention to the Responsibility to Protect, a great deal of the credit should also be given to President Obama. The U.S. administration has elevated R2P as a policy framework, incorporating it in the new National Security Strategy and developing a whole-of-government approach to implementation across the range of agencies and departments of their government. In Libya, protecting civilians trumped traditional geo-strategic analysis. While this is a promising development, UN-sanctioned civilian protection operations such as we are seeing in Libya are still the exception, not the rule.

In Cote D’Ivoire a political crisis is degenerating into armed ethnic conflict. On March 25 ECOWAS, the relevant regional organization, appealed to the Security Council to take “all necessary measures” to assist UNOCI, the UN’s peacekeeping force in the country, in order to protect civilians and prevent a renewed civil war. So far, the Security Council has authorized a slight increase in the size of UNOCI, but this has not been sufficient to prevent a widening civil war.

Military intervention (for humanitarian purposes or otherwise) is always selective, depending on a range of factors including political will, military ability, international legitimacy and practical constraints on the ground.

The international community’s failure to intervene effectively in all instances should not lead us to condemn intervention in those circumstances when it is possible. The task ahead is twofold:
- to ensure that the resolution is not distorted or used for purposes other than the civilian protection objectives for which it was created. Avoid “mission creep”.
- to build on the consensus that Libya and Resolution 1973 represents. Now that R2P has demonstrable consequences, governments must do much more to develop the R2P toolbox, as well as learn from previous mistakes. The debate must become more deeply engaged.

At the UN, there is much that can be done to broaden the organization’s capacity to operationalize and implement this emerging norm. There is a range of legal, administrative and political measures that would provide the UN with a more robust R2P toolkit in the years ahead. These include:
- developing the UN’s information management and early warning capacities;
- developing the ability to deploy peacekeepers rapidly, particularly in the early stages of conflict;
- expanding and strengthening the UN’s corps of mediators;
- diminishing the recourse of the Security Council’s permanent members to use their veto to block action when mass atrocity crimes are being committed.

In short, the UN’s resolution 1973 represents a crucial measure to save lives and help the Libyan people transform their country from an authoritarian to a democratic state. And in doing so, it reinforces a standard that can and should evolve to responsibly protect the human security of citizens elsewhere, when mass atrocities threaten.