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

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.