Implementing the Responsibility to Protect in the Asia Pacific: An Assessment of Progress and Challenges

Abstract

Stemming from the horrors of the Rwandan genocide in 1994 and the genocide in Srebrenica the following year, the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is an internationally agreed principle adopted unanimously by Heads of State and Government at the 2005 United Nations World Summit and subsequently reaffirmed by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly and UN Security Council. R2P recognises that states have a responsibility to protect their own populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. It requires that the international community assist and encourage individual states to fulfil their responsibility and that when states are ‘manifestly failing’ to protect their populations from these four crimes, the international community should respond in a ‘timely and decisive’ fashion with diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means and, should that be deemed inadequate, with all the tools available to the UN Security Council. R2P calls specifically for the prevention of atrocity crimes and of their incitement. This study evaluates the efforts of 21 states in the Asia Pacific region to implement their responsibility to protect. It employs an analytical framework of 36 indicators across seven distinct areas, based largely (though not exclusively) on the UN Secretary-General’s recommendations for the implementation of R2P. It finds that the Asia Pacific region is performing moderately well, achieving an average index score within the median range. There are, however, significant differences in individual country experiences. The countries that have done most to implement R2P are Australia, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea and Timor-Leste. At the other end of the spectrum, North Korea has done almost nothing to fulfil its R2P. Other relatively weak performers are Myanmar, Laos, Brunei, China and Vietnam. There are three clusters of measures that the Asia Pacific region as a whole performs well on, and three where performance is almost uniformly weak.