‘Independent Review of the Implementation of the IASC Protection Policy

In 2016, the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) adopted a Protection Policy to reaffirm the importance of protection in humanitarian action and emphasise its significance as a collective responsibility of all humanitarian actors. Building on the adoption of the IASC Principals’ Statement on the Centrality of Protection, the IASC Protection Policy emphasised two critical departures to how protection had been approached within the humanitarian sector until that point. First, it aimed to elevate protection to a system-wide responsibility, rather than just a concern of the protection cluster. This required making the shift from protection solely as a sectoral activity to a collective responsibility of the entire humanitarian system. Second, it framed protection as an outcome that humanitarian actors should seek to achieve in terms of reducing risks to violence, coercion and deliberate deprivation (herein referred to as reducing risks) of affected populations, rather than just an activity to be undertaken. This required a shift in how risks are analysed and how interventions are designed to address them.