International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty

The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) was an ad hoc commission of participants which in 2001 worked to popularize the concept of humanitarian intervention and democracy-restoring intervention under the name of "Responsibility to protect".

The Commission was founded by Gareth Evans and Mohamed Sahnoun under the authority of the Canadian Government and consisted of members from the UN General Assembly. The purpose of the Committee was to arrive at an answer to the question posed by Kofi Annan: "if humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica - to gross and systematic violations of human rights that affect every precept of our common humanity?" The question summarises the ongoing debate between those who value the norm of humanitarian intervention above state sovereignty and vice versa.

A state's sovereignty is also under question, in terms of legitimacy. Sovereignty is dependent upon the state's responsibility to its people; if not fulfilled, then the contract between the government and its citizen is void, thus the sovereignty is not legitimate.

Research conducted by the ICISS culminated in the ICISS Report, which included recommendations to the international community on the normative debate of humanitarian intervention versus state sovereignty. The report, although long, fails to address many key issues that plague this debate. The report added to the existing confusion and several key recommendations are of legal concern.

For instance, Sections 4.18-4.21 of the Report show an eagerness to approach the issue of what scale of atrocity necessitates humanitarian intervention. However the researchers shied away from committing to any concrete definition, with the impetus of the Commission showing through in Section 4.21 of their report:

In both the broad conditions we identified - loss of life and ethnic cleansing - we have described the action in question as needing to be "large scale" in order to justify military intervention. We make no attempt to quantify "large scale": opinions may differ in some marginal cases (for example, where a number of small scale incidents may build cumulatively into large scale atrocity), but most will not in practice generate major disagreement. What we do make clear, however, is that military action can be legitimate as an anticipatory measure in response to clear evidence of likely large scale killing. Without this possibility of anticipatory action, the international community would be placed in the morally untenable position of being required to wait until genocide begins, before being able to take action to stop it.

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