Responsibility to protect
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The responsibility to protect (R2P or RtoP) is a global political commitment that was endorsed by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly at the 2005 World Summit in order to address its four key concerns: preventing genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. The R2P doctrine has become a unanimous and well-established international norm since the early 2000s.
The principle of the responsibility to protect is based upon the underlying premise that sovereignty entails a responsibility to protect all populations from mass atrocity crimes and human rights violations. The R2P is based on respect for the norms and principles of international law, especially the underlying principles of law concerning sovereignty, peace and security, human rights, and armed conflict. The R2P has three pillars:
- Pillar I—The protection responsibilities of the state: "Each individual state has the responsibility to protect its population from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity."
- Pillar II—International assistance and capacity-building: States pledge to assist each other in their protection responsibilities.
- Pillar III—Timely and decisive collective response: If any state is "manifestly failing" in its protection responsibilities, then states should take collective action to protect the population.
While there is agreement among states on the responsibility to protect, there is persistent contestation over the applicability of the third pillar in practice. R2P provides a framework for employing existing measures—that is, mediation, early warning mechanisms, economic sanctions, and powers from Chapter VII of the UN Charter—to prevent atrocity crimes and protect civilians from their occurrence. The authority to employ force under the framework of the responsibility to protect rests solely with the UN Security Council (UNSC) and is considered a measure of last resort.
The doctrine of the responsibility to protect has been the subject of considerable debate, particularly about the implementation of the principle by various actors in the context of country-specific situations, such as in Kenya, Libya, Syria, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Palestine.