The procedural resolution, introduced by Croatia, officially puts R2P on the annual UNGA agenda and requires the UN Secretary General to report annually on the subject.

In a vote at the UN headquarters in New York, the United States, on Tuesday, the resolution received overwhelming support from 115 member states, including from several ASEAN members, such as Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines. Another 28 countries chose to abstain.

Indonesia was among 15 countries to vote “no”, a decision that has raised questions about its commitment to the prevention of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.

But Foreign Ministry director general for multilateral affairs Febrian Ruddyard contended that Indonesia did not oppose R2P as a concept, partly because all UN member states had agreed to it at the 2005 World Summit.

Rather, Febrian said, Indonesia believed the subject had already been adequately addressed in the follow-up to the 2005 declaration and that the UNGA should first seek to resolve any unanswered questions about its implementation.

R2P is a set of principles based on the premise that countries have the responsibility to protect all populations from mass atrocities and human rights violations. The norms were introduced after the international community’s failure to prevent the Rwandan genocide and the Srebrenica massacre in the mid-1990s.

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