Responding to the call by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan in September 1999, then-Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy set up an independent, 12-member International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty to try to bridge the divide between international intervention and national sovereignty. The report of the commission was formally presented to Annan in New York on Dec. 18, 2001.
There is already a vast literature on the subject that ICISS was set up to address, including studies by the Danish and Dutch governments. Why bother with another study? What did we do that was a substantial advance?
My answer is that ICISS had six distinguishing features: balance, independence, outreach, comprehensiveness, innovativeness and political realism.