Скачать или смотреть The Responsibility to Protect Doctrine: A Humanitarian Intervention Mechanism

The primary objective of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine (R2P) is to never allow the international community to stand aside in the wake of industrial scale human atrocities and to forbid sovereignty to take precedence over gross human rights violations, such as genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. Originally conceptualized in the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty’s 2011 report, it outlined a robust framework for humanitarian intervention. The R2P was officially established as a doctrine at the UN World Summit by Heads of State and Government in 2005. It is regarded as a noble global political commitment due to the very fact that it reinforces the responsibility of heads of state and government to protect civilian populations. After its adoption, it began to take shape and evolve to eventually be mired with complexities and inconsistency.

The original version of R2P outlined specifically three separate responsibilities: the responsibility to prevent, react, and rebuild. Within this report, it was asserted that all three preconditions must be present in order to successfully and legitimately intervene and thereby protect a population from mass humanitarian crises. It succinctly outlines four crimes which would merit implementation of R2P while at the same time reaffirming the state’s responsibility to protect their civilian population and the international community’s responsibility to protect them in the event the state is unwilling or unable to do so. The paper will argue that R2P, while a noble concept, is undermined in its ability to consistently and effectively protect civilian populations from serious international crimes. This is primarily due to the fact that the R2P has been held hostage by the UN Security Council, the body that holds the express right to invoke pillar three (timely and decisive response), due to divergent geopolitical interests, thereby rendering the doctrine ineffective in its applicability. Within this context, the paper will use the UNSC decisions on invoking R2P in Libya and failing to do so in the case of Syria, in support of the above premise.