The Responsibility to Protect: Focus on the Responsibility to Prevent and the role of Regional and Civil Society Organizations

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ABSTRACT 
Recalling the inconsistency of the international community to protect populations from terrible crimes, 
especially from genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing, and acknowledging the 
failure of the Security Council to act in crisis such as Rwanda, Somalia, Darfur and Kosovo, the UN former 
Secretary General Kofi Annan urged the member states of the UN to defend the common humanity and to 
find and adequate way to respond to mass atrocities. For this reason, in 2001, Gareth Evans, Michael 
Ignatieff and Mohamed Shanoun first formulated the “responsibility to protect”, a doctrine which holds the 
duty to protect communities from mass atrocities, by halting them before they occur. The responsibility to 
protect gives the priority to its first element which is the responsibility to prevent mass atrocities, 
acknowledging that preventing terrible crimes before they occur is way better than intervention, because it 
reduces the number of victim and the damages, and in the case of a structural prevention it sets up the basis 
for a long term peace and continuous development. 
However, even if it has been clarified that prevention is the most important aspect of the responsibility to 
protect, many States remain skeptical to sacrifice their resources to protect strangers. In addition, there is an 
issue on the mistrust and the lack of political willingness, the lack of enforcement mechanisms and 
jurisdiction, and the unavailability of necessary funds for an effective prevention policy. 
Subsequently, this responsibility to prevent mass atrocities requires the implication of regional and civil 
society organizations. Regional organizations and civil society play an important function in preventing mass 
atrocities, but, the inadequacy of their preventive policies, the lack of a compelling capacity, the 
disagreement on their shared values, the apprehension on their authorities and the absence of a common 
budget to prevent mass atrocities; show that giving more importance to the actions of regional and civil 
society organizations, especially because of their proximity to the local contexts is necessary. Accordingly, 
there is a need of the harmonization of the preventive functions of regional and civil society organizations 
into a common international prevention framework and their conformity to the national and local institutions.
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INTRODUCTION 
 
After the debacle of the intervention in Somalia in 1993, the incompetent response to the genocide in 
Rwanda in 1994, the failure to prevent ethnic cleansing in Srebrenica in 1995 and the war crimes in Kosovo 
in 1999, the International community became skeptical about the doctrine of humanitarian interventions. 
From this inconsistency of the action of the international society to halt and stop such mass killing, emerged 
the “Responsibility to Protect”, a norm which gives primary importance to its first element, “the 
responsibility to prevent”, because of the idea that focusing on prevention and acknowledging the duty of the 
whole community to protect populations would give more credibility to this emerging norm. However, the 
ongoing crisis are demonstrating that, there is a need to implement the policy of the prevention of mass 
atrocities, and this can be done by giving major importance to regional and civil society organizations; this is 
especially, because of their attachment to the local populations, local cultures and their proximity to the 
context and the political issues. Regional and civil society organizations have this capacity to influence the 
national institutions, because somehow, their prevention policy may be easily welcomed than the action of 
other states. Accordingly, this dissertation raises the issue of the place of regional organizations and civil 
society for the success of the responsibility of the international community to prevent genocide and mass 
atrocities. Because of the controversial morality of the use of military force, and the challenges faced by the 
prevention of mass atrocities, what measures should be adopted to improve the involvement of regional and 
civil society organizations? In this logic, the first part and the following one of this paper will analyze the 
responsibility to protect as a doctrine which acknowledges the importance of the responsibility to prevent 
genocide and mass atrocities. For this reason, and especially due to the fact that the use of force is usually 
criticized, it will emphasize the fact that the international community should focus more on the prevention of 
mass atrocity crimes in order to reduce the arms done and the number of victims. Nevertheless, because of 
the limitations of the prevention of mass atrocity, finally, it will be established that this responsibility to 
prevent requires the implication of regional and civil society organizations which play an important function 
in preventing mass atrocities even if they face some challenges in the accomplishment of their prevention 
policies, leading to the need of the harmonization of their prevention policies into a common international 
prevention framework, which will then be adapted to national institutions.
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I. Understanding the responsibility to protect 
 
A. Generalities on the responsibility to protect 
 
Many crises which occurred in the last decade, demonstrated the limitations of humanitarian intervention and 
the necessity to find an alternative doctrine in order to protect the civilians from suffering. Recalling the 
failure of the Security Council to act in Rwanda and Kosovo, the UN former Secretary General Kofi Annan 
urged the member states of the UN to defend the common humanity and to find and adequate way to respond 
to mass atrocities, as argued in the ICISS report (2001, p.2). This reinstatement of Kofi Annan found an 
answer in September 2000, when the Canadian government announced the establishment of the International 
Commission on the Responsibility to Protect, aimed at “reconciling intervention for humanitarian purposes 
and sovereignty” (ICISS, 2001, p.2). The “responsibility to protect” was then first formulated in February 
2001 by Gareth Evans, Michael Ignatieff and Mohamed Shanoun.  In 2005, during the World Summit, the 
“responsibility to protect” was unanimously endorsed, as affirmed by Bellamy (2013, p.10), giving it a scope 
and a final language through the paragraphs 138 and 139. Even the Security Council in 2006, accorded to 
this doctrine, and most importantly, in 2009, the Secretary General of the UN Ban Ki-Moon released a report 
on the implementation of the responsibility to protect; which showed the engagement of the international 
community to do the necessary to prevent mass atrocities, and to the protection of civilians as a duty.  
The primary concern of the responsibility to protect is the duty to protect communities from mass atrocities, 
by halting them before they occur. Hence it is based on the fact that the “sovereignty is a responsibility” and 
every state has the responsibility and the duty to protect its population. Taking inspiration from Francis M. 
Deng et al., the ICISS sought to redefine sovereignty, so that “It would no longer constitute a guarantee 
against interference but would instead be synonymous of responsibility” as argued by Stammes (2008, p.72). 
In this sense, the World summit outcome of the UN (2005, p.31, pars. 138-139) enounced that the 
responsibility to protect is addressed primarily to the States which have the duty to use all the available and 
appropriate means to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and
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ethnic cleansing. The UN World Summit affirmed also that the International Community has the duty to 
encourage and assist states to this task and only if they are evidently either unwilling or unable to fulfill this 
duty, the international community have therefore the remaining responsibility to do all the necessary to 
protect the populations (A ⁄ 60 ⁄ L.1, September 20, 2005, para.139). The responsibility to protect, in 
response to the dilemma of humanitarian intervention which focuses mainly on interventions, is a norm 
which goes beyond military intervention, mainly because it encompasses three obligations, the responsibility 
to rebuild, the responsibility to react and the most important, the responsibility to prevent (ICISS, 
supranote.16, ch.3- 5). This last element constitutes the core of the R2P norm, which gives it more 
legitimacy, than humanitarian intervention. It is however important to underline the crimes included in the 
doctrine of the responsibility to protect. 
 
What exactly are the four crimes of concerned by the Responsibility to Protect? 
The responsibility to protect focuses only on four main crimes, which are Genocide, war crimes, crimes 
against humanity and ethnic cleansing. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) has 
given some definitions to these crimes, which have also been defined in international humanitarian law. It is 
important to underline these crimes because, the sooner a crime is identified and halted, the lesser the 
consequences for the populations would be. In country where there is continuous violation of human rights, 
many social differences and inequalities, there are predispositions for these four crimes to be perpetrated.  
Genocide is defined as acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial 
or religious group, such as  “Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to 
members of the group; Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its 
physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; 
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” (Bellamy & McLoughlin, 2009. p.12) and other 
similar crimes have the status of Genocide. Francis Deng, Special Adviser of the UN on the Prevention of 
Genocide in April 2008, stated that “Genocide is one of the most heinous of crimes against which all of 
humanity must unite to prevent its recurrence and punish those responsible” (OSAPG, 2010, p.1)