The background to its introduction was a decade of gut-wrenching international division in the 1990’s about how to react to mass atrocity crimes, with the global North by and large supporting “humanitarian intervention,” the South rallying to the old cry of non-interference in states’ domestic affairs, and consensus nowhere in sight. The result was either UN-authorized action that was erratic, incomplete, or counterproductive – as in the Somalia debacle of 1993, the Rwandan genocide in 1994, and the massacre in Srebrenica in 1995 – or action that was eventually effective, but not UN-authorized – and thus unlawful – as in Kosovo in 1999.