R2P at Twenty: Looking back and looking forward

Address to Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect Commemorative Event, Australian UN Mission, Geneva, 3 November 2025

If anyone needed a wake-up call as to the critical importance of keeping the Responsibility to Protect (‘R2P’) flame alive, it surely came with the news this week of the terrible massacre in El Fasher – just the latest in a long line of mass atrocity crimes which have killed more than 80 million men, women and children over the last century.

When the core principles of R2P were unanimously embraced twenty years ago by over 150 heads of state and government attending the UN 60th Anniversary World Summit, hopes were extraordinarily high that the world was at last on its way to ending genocide and other mass atrocity crimes once and for all. That we were on our way to making ‘Never Again’ a reality, to making a thing of the past those “gross and systematic violations of human rights that offend every precept of our common humanity”, as Kofi Annan described them.

The British historian Martin Gilbert went so far as to excitedly describe as ‘the most significant adjustment to sovereignty in 360 years’ the principles that were unanimously endorsed by the UN General Assembly in 2005: that every sovereign state has the responsibility to protect its own population from, ethnic cleansing, other crimes against humanity and war crimes (‘Pillar One’); that every state has the responsibility, to the extent of its capacity, to assist others to so act (‘Pillar Two’) and that it is the responsibility of the wider international community, if a state is ‘manifestly failing’ to protect its people to respond in a ‘timely and decisive’ fashion and by all appropriate means, not excluding coercive military action, in accordance with the UN Charter (‘Pillar Three’). Groundbreaking stuff indeed.

But that was twenty years ago, and in 2025 the landscape, as we are all acutely aware is much bleaker, with optimism about the ultimate triumph of decency in much shorter supply. Security Council consensus is now non-existent, the United States under Trump no longer pays even lip-service to humanitarian values, inward looking populist nationalism is on the rise almost everywhere, and there has been a manifest failure by the international community to prevent or effectively respond to a whole new series of atrocity crime catastrophes in Sri Lanka, Syria, Myanmar, Ukraine, Gaza and now again in Sudan. So much so that a number of sceptical and cynical voices from both the global South and global North are being heard to argue that the whole R2P norm-creation enterprise has been a complete waste of time or worse.

But, while acknowledging that reality, my strong belief is that would be a tragedy now to succumb to the cynics and sceptics, to fail to recognize the magnitude of our achievement twenty years ago, to fail to see the continuing force of R2P as an energizing ideal, and to abandon the aspiration to see it fully and effectively implemented in all its dimensions.

To begin with the scale of the original achievement, overcoming hurdles that seemed then to be almost as impossible to surmount as those we face now. I’ve described elsewhere the birth of R2P as a play in three Acts. The first Act, in which the central player was the Canadian-sponsored International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), which I was privileged to co-chair, along with the hugely respected African diplomat Mohamed Sahnoun (well-remembered here in Geneva), involved confronting the reality that – even after the horrors of Rwanda and Srebrenica in the mid-90s had shocked the world’s conscience to the extent they did – there was zero global consensus as to how to react. The only debate was around the issue of the use of military force. The global North talked the talk, but only occasionally walked the walk, of ‘humanitarian intervention’; and the global South, given its long experience of imperial missions civilisatrices, was deeply hostile to any notion of the big guys having the right to throw their weight around militarily.

The achievement of ICISS, with our report entitled The Responsibility to Protect published in 2001, was to establish new foundations for just that consensus. We did it by making four big conceptual shifts in our report: changing the language of the debate, with the ‘responsibility to protect’ being much less inherently abrasive than the ‘right to intervene’; emphasizing that multiple actors shared that responsibility, not just the big military players, as was the case with humanitarian intervention; strongly emphasising preventive strategies, not just reactive ones as was the case with humanitarian intervention; identifying and supporting a whole continuum of reaction measures, not just military ones, as was the case with humanitarian intervention, but including diplomatic isolation, and sanctions and embargoes, and threats of International Criminal Court prosecution; and insisting that the bar for any military intervention be set very high, with legality dependent on Security Council endorsement, and legitimacy dependent on satisfying clear prudential criteria, including proportionality and doing, on balance, more good than harm.

Act II was the report in 2004 of the UN Secretary-General’s High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, which was the critical transmission mechanism in ensuring that the Commission’s key recommendations, which might otherwise have died a familiar death (particularly with the world’s attention overwhelmingly focused on terrorism issues after 9/11), were picked up enthusiastically by Kofi Annan, and featured prominently in the World Summit agenda.

And Act III was the World Summit itself in 2005, where very little else of any substance was agreed, and the embrace of R2P was far from inevitable. There was strong support from Canada, Australia, the European Union, and more belatedly from the United States. But against some fierce rearguard resistance from a small group of developing countries, encouraged by Russia, the support that mattered most came from sub-Saharan African countries, led by South Africa, who made it clear to their developing country friends that, when it came to mass atrocity crimes, they saw indifference as a greater sin than intervention. This was supplemented by a clear, and historically quite significant, embrace of limited-sovereignty principles by key Latin Americans. The final unanimously agreed text in paragraphs 138 and 139 of the Outcome Document may have been, as so many multilaterally negotiated products are, a messy word salad, and not every element of the ICISS and HLP reports were picked up – most importantly our recommended prudential criteria for military action – but the really critical themes all were.

The finishing touch to the whole creative enterprise, I should perhaps add, was made a little later, in the Secretary-General’s report to the General Assembly in 2009 written by his Special Adviser Ed Luck, with its helpful distillation of the rather convoluted Summit Outcome Document paragraphs into the much more accessible ‘Three Pillars’ language which we all now use.

Looking back now on the course of events since that heady achievement, there is – despite everything that has fallen short of our hopes –still much to give comfort to R2P supporters. I have argued for years that the success or failure of R2P should be measured against the four big things that R2P was designed by its founders be: a normative force; a catalyst for institutional change; a framework for effective preventive action; and a framework for effective reactive action when prevention has failed. There is zero room for complacency, particularly in the post-truth, post-rationality, post-decency, Trumpian world we now inhabit. But there are positive things we can say on each of these fronts.

Normatively, as evidenced in annual General Assembly debates and multiple Security Council resolutions, ‘R2P’ still commands a degree of global acceptance and traction unimaginable for ‘humanitarian intervention’. Although many states are still clearly more comfortable with the first two pillars of R2P than they are with the third (which they too often associate solely with military intervention), and there will always be argument about what precise form action should take in a particular case, there is no longer any serious dissent evident in relation to any of the elements of the 2005 Resolution.

Institutionally real progress has been made in developing both national civilian and military response preparedness and international legal accountability mechanisms, with the ICC – although now under renewed assault from the US and others – finding its feet and many new monitoring, investigating and evidence collection mechanisms being established, with the Geneva-based Human Rights Council, and Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights playing important roles here. Institutionally (with I’m pleased to say the Global Centre playing a really central role, as it also does acting as the secretariat for the UN Group of Friends of R2P ), 61 countries and 2 regional organizations (EU and OAS) have now appointed an R2P Focal Point – a designated high-level official whose job is to analyse atrocity risk and mobilize appropriate responses – although I do worry that this has too often become a box-ticking rather than genuinely substantive enterprise Civilian response capability is receiving much more organized attention, as is the need for militaries to rethink their force configuration, doctrine, rules of engagement, and training to deal better with mass atrocity response operations.

Preventively, R2P-driven strategies have had a number of under-noticed successes, notably in stopping the recurrence of violence in Kenya, the West African cases of Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire and The Gambia, and in Kyrgyzstan, while volatile situations such as Burundi get recurring Security Council attention of a kind unknown to Rwanda in the 1990s.

Reactively, the final benchmark – ensuring effective response to atrocity crises actually under way –this is obviously at best still work in progress. There have been partial successes – more often involving diplomatic than military pressure – in Kenya, Côte d’Ivoire, Congo, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic, and initially at least, in Libya.

But also too many failures, not helped by the re-emergence of major power rivalry and obstruction in the Security Council, further now entrenched with the re-election of Donald Trump as US President. That said, neither China nor Russia have been totally hostile to the concept of R2P – with Russia even calling it in aid to try to justify its initial assaults on Georgia and Ukraine, so getting them to eventually return to a more consensual approach may not be a totally lost cause. Though it would help in this respect if the P3 could bring itself to acknowledge that it over-reached in Libya in 2011: that was when R2P’s champagne moment – the consensus decision of the Security Council to support military intervention to stop an imminent massacre in Benghazi – turned to dust with the very non-consensual decision of the US, UK and France to pursue not just civilian protection but regime change. That laid the seeds for the subsequent failure to effectively respond to atrocity crimes in Syria and too many other theatres since.

There will always be acute difficulty – even without Putin, Xi Jinping and Trump in power – in getting Council agreement on the use of coercive military force. Given that such force has been misused in the past, and the stakes and risks are always so high, it is right that the bar for action here always be set very high. But it should not be set impossibly high, and there is a proposal to cut through the present paralysis, the Responsibility While Protecting’ concept that was put on the table by Brazil in late 2011, that in my judgement remains the most constructive of all the suggested ways forward.

The critical need for supporters of R2P is to continue to make the case that R2P is about much more than military intervention in the most extreme cases; that there simply is no other set of principles anyone can identify, using different terminology and concepts, and addressing both prevention and reaction, which is remotely capable of finding common ground between the global South and North, and energizing collective action; and that it is not remotely helpful to duck away from even using ‘R2P’ terminology as too provocative, as some of the strongest original supporters of R2P have shown some inclination to do.

Above all, it is crucial to stay optimistic. Here as elsewhere, if we want to change the world for the better, we have to start by believing in the possibility of change, and never stop working to make it happen.