International Security: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Christopher S. Browning Page A

Kosovo, however, NATO proclaimed ethnic cleansing and human rights abuses as themselves sufficient grounds for action. In this respect, NATO’s action in Kosovo needs to be seen in the context of the international community’s failure to respond effectively to both the Rwandan genocide and the widespread ethnic cleansing and mass atrocities endemic to the wars accompanying Yugoslavia’s break-up in the early 1990s. In the face of such morally repugnant actions the international community’s failure to respond effectively was felt as shameful by many and raised the question of the relative value attached to principles of sovereignty and non-intervention compared with those of human rights.
    As noted, the UN Charter has traditionally been understood as prioritizing principles of state sovereignty and non-intervention. Such principles have a moral foundation premised on upholdingrespect for different cultures, religions, and political and economic systems and are intended to thwart any imperial ambitions of territorial aggrandizement particular states might be harbouring. However, the Charter’s Preamble also includes a commitment ‘to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person’. The question therefore arises as to what the UN should do in situations, as in Rwanda or Kosovo, when principles of non-intervention and human rights appear to conflict.
    Although the Charter includes no mention of rights of humanitarian intervention, throughout the 1990s the question was increasingly being asked whether states, either unable to protect their citizens’ human rights or directly infringing them, might lose their rights to sovereignty. In Kosovo NATO decided the Serbian government had. Indeed, from within the UN Secretariat a rethinking of the nature of sovereignty had already begun, led by Francis Deng, the UN Secretary-General’s representative on internally displaced persons. In an influential book published in 1996 Deng argued that understandings of sovereignty should be broadened. Alongside the traditional emphasis on the possession of a territory, people to govern, and authority over those people, sovereignty should also be understood as including a responsibility to protect minimal standards of human rights, a responsibility for which governments could be held accountable by their citizens, but also by the international community. The suggestion was that states should only be allowed to claim the benefits of sovereignty(i.e. non-intervention) if this responsibility was being discharged. Failure to do so, however, would legitimize international intervention. As Secretary-General Kofi Annan stated to the UN Commission on Human Rights in 1999, ‘if we allow the United Nations to become the refuge of [the] ethnic cleanser or mass murderer, we will betray the very ideals that inspired the founding of the United Nations’.
    The case supporting international interventions on humanitarian grounds was further developed by the 2001 report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) on
The Responsibility to Protect
(popularly shortened to R2P). Sponsored by the Canadian government the R2P report shifted the emphasis from the international community having a ‘right’, to it having a ‘duty’ to intervene in situations when states were failing to protect human rights. Two things were particularly important about the report.
    First, alongside a ‘responsibility to react’ to mass atrocities through the use of enforcement mechanisms, it also outlined a ‘responsibility to prevent’ and a ‘responsibility to rebuild’, indicating that the international community had significant responsibilities to stop humanitarian abuses in the first place and to prevent them from recurring through post-conflict rebuilding programmes. Prevention, for example, might include the promotion of good governance and attempts to properly regulate the arms trade.
    Second,