In his March report on United Nations Reform priorities, Secretary General Kofi Annan urges Heads of State and Government to “embrace the 'responsibility to protect' as a basis for collective action against genocide, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.”
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The so-called "right of humanitarian intervention" has been one of the most controversial foreign policy issues of the last decade - both when intervention has happened, as in Kosovo, and when it has failed to happen, as in Rwanda. United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, in his report to the 2000 General Assembly, challenged the international community to try to forge consensus, once and for all, around the basic questions of principle and process involved: when should intervention occur, under whose authority, and how. The independent International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty was established by the Government of Canada in September 2000 to respond to that challenge.
The Commission's report, The Responsibility to Protect, is the culmination of twelve months of intensive research, worldwide consultations and deliberation. It has been formally presented to Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the United Nations community, where it will hopefully help build a new consensus in the debate the Commission was mandated to advance. The full text of the report is contained in this website.
The research and consultations which laid the foundations for the Commission's report have been compiled and published as a supplementary volume entitled The Responsibility to Protect: Research, Bibliography, Background. The contents of this volume are contained in their entirety in this website, and we have also presented them broken-down into the three key parts of the volume for ease of navigation. The first part contains background research in the form of nine substantial research essays; the second part is a comprehensive new bibliography; and the third, about the Commission, contains background information on how the Commission functioned and summaries of the consultations held around the world during its year-long mandate. This work, like the report itself, should prove a quarry for scholars, specialists and policy makers for many years to come.
