The UN Security Council’s Role in Fulfilling the Responsibility to Protect

Two decades ago, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) recalled a warning from then-UN secretary-general Kofi Annan: “If the collective conscience of humanity . . . cannot find in the United Nations its greatest tribune, there is a grave danger that it will look elsewhere for peace and for justice.” 
The Security Council has not only employed various diplomatic, political, and humanitarian measures to address atrocity crimes but also adjusted the purposes and practices of peace operations to advance protection goals and more subtly shaped discourses and expectations about state responsibilities for protection. 
However, looking at the past five or six years of the Security Council’s performance—including its paralysis in the face of the grim siege of the Syrian city of Aleppo in December 2016, its virtual nonreaction to the attacks by Myanmar state security forces against the Rohingya in 2017, its limited response to the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen, and its inability for months to agree on a statement or resolution regarding the COVID-19 pandemic—it is tempting to conclude that we have already crossed over into that dangerous terrain Annan warned about, writes JENNIFER M. WELSH in the journal Ethics and International Affairs. 
Contrary to the predictions of ICISS, however, we have yet to see an institution or forum supplant the UN as the focal point for the pursuit of peace and justice, the author states in her article titled ‘The Security Council’s Role in Fulfilling the Responsibility to Protect’. “Instead, there is a gaping black hole, as multilateralism comes apart at the seams.”
Skeptics may rightly point out that all of the alternatives to the Security Council – particularly the General Assembly – continue to face structural and political barriers to exercising their full potential, as components of an integrated structure, for addressing threats to international security and responding to atrocity crime situations, WELSH states. Nonetheless, the current crisis of multilateralism, which was extensively debated at the virtual events in 2020 marking the seventy-fifth anniversary of the UN, presents a unique moment to revitalize and reinvest in mechanisms of global cooperation, lest they slide further into deadlock and irrelevance. 
A variety of proposals to improve performance and accountability have been tabled, including the creation of a UN parliamentary assembly that would enable further consideration of the domestic impact of multilateral decisions and increase democratic oversight of key components of the existing UN system. 
If such a scheme were to be realized – and this remains a big if, WELSH stresses – it could serve as a catalyst for more extensive reforms of both the General Assembly and the Security Council, as well as erode the latter's monopoly on the right to propose policies to manage international peace and security. 
At the time of writing, WELSH states, we do not know whether the opportunity presented by crises will be seized or if stasis and retrenchment will ensue. After all, while crises have been relatively frequent in the history of our modern international system, meaningful transformation of institutions and political orders has been much less common. 
“Let us hope that vulnerable populations around the world do not continue to pay the price for our collective failure of imagination and resolve.”

Welsh, J. (2021). The Security Council's Role in Fulfilling the Responsibility to Protect. Ethics & International Affairs, 35(2), 227-243. doi:10.1017/S089267942100023X