291 Pilar Pozo Serrano The United Nations Charter s nty, how should we respond to situations like Rwanda and Srebrenica, and the serious and systematic violations of the human rights that transgress all of the principles of our common humanity?” The report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), entitled the responsibility to protect, published in December 2001, sought to provide an answer to this question. The Report underlines the argument that each State has the principal responsibility for protecting its population and the international community has subsidiary responsibility, when it is clear that a certain State “does not wish to or cannot comply with its responsibility to protect or the material author of the crimes or atrocities, or when the actions that take place in said State entail a direct threat to other people that live outside it”.37 In this latter case, according the Report, the responsibility to protect of the international community would have the priority over the principle of non-intervention.38 The Report cautiously stated that international practice seemed to point towards the appearance of a norm in this respect, which is still in the process of coming together.39 Four years later on, the High-level Panel followed the line traced out by the Commission, underlining the change that the international community had been going through in its way of understanding sovereignty and the acceptance of a collective responsibility to protect. The exercising of this form of responsibility could lead to the adoption of coercive actions of a different nature, including military action even though this may be a last resort. As for the authority legitimated to adopt such measures, the Commission had indicated that it should be the Security Council as the body primarily responsible for keeping the international peace and security. In this same regard, pronouncements were made by the High-level Panel 40 and the Secretary General.41 The 2005 Summit Declaration provided support for this idea, although it is evasive 37 The ICISS expressly states that this responsibility is due to three reasons: “firstly, it means that the state authorities are responsible for protecting the life and satefy of its citizens and promoting their well-being; secondly, it suggests that national pólice authorities are responsible to citizens at the internal level and the international community through the United Nations, and thirdly, they have to settle accounts for their acts or omissions. This concept of sovereignty supported by the growing influence of human rights standards and by the increased presence of the concept of human security in international discourse”. Cfr. The responsibility to protect, para. 2.15, p. 14. 38 The responsibility to protect, para. 2.28 y 2.29, pp. 17-18. 39 The responsibility to protect, para. 2.24, pp. 16-17. 40 Cfr. A more secure world, para. 203: ““We approve the norm that is being imposed in the sense of there being a collective international responsibility to protect, which the Security Council can exercise by authorising military intervention as the last resort in the case of genocide and other large scale massacres,of ethnic cleansing or serious violations of international humanitarian law that a soverign government has not been able or not wanted to prevent.” 41 A broader concept of liberty, para. 135.
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