Fault-tolerant control is an important issue in control of mission critical processes. In this paper, a new approach to fault-tolerant control of unstable processes is proposed based on the Passivity Theorem. The control system is designed in two sequential steps: A multi-loop proportional controller is used to stabilize the unstable process; a passivity-based decentralized unconditionally stabilizing (DUS) controller is then applied to the stabilized process. While the multi-loop stabilizing controllers need to be built with redundancy, the DUS controller is inherently fault tolerant and can maintain closed-loop stability when any of its loops fail. By using a stabilizing proportional controller with the fewest loops, control redundancy can be reduced to the minimum level. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.