A State’s Ability and Willingness to Fulfill the Responsibility to Protect Its People: The International Community Facing the Syrian Humanitarian Crisis

Abstract

In 2005, the UN Member States agreed on the principle of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) in their effort to reconcile the tension between the normative principles of the human rights protection and of non-intervention into the matters of domestic jurisdiction. The 2005 World Summit Outcome states that the international community must be “prepared to take collective action (…), through the Security Council (…), should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations’ from the prescribed atrocities [A/60/L.1, 15 September 2005, para.139].” Nonetheless, the international reaction to the Syrian crisis since 2011 has shown that there are no shared expectations in the international community regarding exactly what conditions constitute the manifest failure of a state to protect its people. As contrasted with the Libyan crisis in 2011, where the Security Council authorized its member states to take all the necessary measures to protect civilians under the threat of attack, it failed to do the same in the case for Syria due to international disputes over the ability and willingness of the Syrian authorities to fulfill the responsibility to protect its people.

This article examines international negotiation within the UN Security Council facing the Syrian crisis, and points out two limitations of the R2P-based approach toward civilian protections. Firstly, the R2P-based justification for interventions requires the international community to reach a common understanding of the ability and willingness of the intervened state to protect its people before everything: without this common understanding, the principle of R2P does not function to resolve normative tension on its own. Under such circumstance, international inaction is more likely to be observed. Secondly, intervening states could justify their interventions not by the controversial R2P principle but by the less controversial normative principles of the proscription against chemical weapons and of self-defense. But their intervention, thus realized, would not achieve the original goal of the protecting people in the intervened-in state, as has been witnessed in the Syrian case.