Responsibility to Protect (R2P)

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

"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"