This book presents the views of various international law and human rights experts on the contested meaning, scope of application, value and viability of R2P; the principle of the Responsibility to Protect . R2P refers to the notion that the international community has a legal responsibility to protect civilians against the potential or ongoing occurrence of the mass atrocity crimes of genocide, large scale war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. R2P allows for intervention where the individual State is unable or unwilling to so protect its people or is in fact a perpetrator. The book addresses also the controversial issue of whether intervention by States implementing R2P with or without the endorsement of the United Nations Security Council constitutes a State act of aggression or instead is legally justified and not an infringement on the offending State’s sovereign jurisdiction. The adverse impact on global peace and security of the failure to protect civilians from mass atrocity crimes has put in stark relief the need to address anew the principle of ‘responsibility to protect’ and the feasibility and wisdom of its application and this book is a significant contribution to that effort. This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Human Rights.

The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is intended to provide an effective framework for responding to crimes of genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. It is a response to the many conscious-shocking cases where atrocities - on the worst scale - have occurred even during the post 1945 period when the United Nations was built to save us all from the scourge of genocide. The R2P concept accords to sovereign states and international institutions a responsibility to assist peoples who are at risk - or experiencing - the worst atrocities. R2P maintains that collective action should be taken by members of the United Nations to prevent or halt such gross violations of basic human rights. This Handbook, containing contributions from leading theorists, and practitioners (including former foreign ministers and special advisors), examines the progress that has been made in the last 10 years; it also looks forward to likely developments in the next decade.

In 2005, the international community made a landmark commitment to prevent mass atrocities by unanimously adopting the UN’s “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) principle. As often as not, however, R2P has failed to translate into decisive action. Why does this gap persist between the world’s normative pledges to R2P and its ability to make it a daily lived reality? In this new book, leading global authorities on humanitarian protection Alex Bellamy and Edward Luck offer a probing and in-depth response to this fundamental question, calling for a more comprehensive approach to the practice of R2P – one that moves beyond states and the UN to include the full range of actors that play a role in protecting vulnerable populations. Drawing on cases from the Middle East to sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, they examine the forces and conditions that produce atrocity crimes and the challenge of responding to them quickly and effectively. Ultimately, they advocate both for emergency policies to temporarily stop carnage and for policies leading to sustainable change within societies and governments. Only by introducing these additional elements to the R2P toolkit will the failures associated with humanitarian crises like Syria and Libya become a thing of the past.

'The Responsibility to Protect' provides a comprehensive view on how this contemporary principle has developed and analyzes how to best apply it to current humanitarian crises.

Responsibility to Protect: Research, bibliography, background. Supplementary volume to the Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty

De tragische gebeurtenissen in Rwanda, Srebrenica en Kosovo hebben geleid0tot een herbezinning over de rol en verantwoordelijkheid van de internationale gemeenschap. In het beginsel Responsibility to Protect (R2P), dat in 2005 door de wereldleiders werd omarmd, hebben individuele staten nog steeds de primaire verantwoordelijkheid voor de bescherming van hun inwoners. Maar als ze die verantwoordelijkheid niet kunnen of willen nemen, komt de verantwoordelijkheid bij de internationale gemeenschap te liggen. R2P heeft de ambitie om herhaling van Rwanda, Srebrenica en Kosovo te voorkomen, maar er bestaat nog grote onduidelijkheid over inhoud en potentieel van dit beginsel. Deze bundel verkent R2P als moreel, politiek en juridisch beginsel en onderzoekt hoe de Verenigde Naties, de Europese Unie, individuele staten en NGO's R2P kunnen gebruiken om ernstige mensenrechtenschendingen te voorkomen.

This book tracks the development of the emerging international legal principle of a responsibility to protect over the past two decades. It contrasts the influential version of the principle introduced by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty in 2001 with subsequent interpretations of the responsibility to protect advocated by the United Nations through its human protection agenda, and reviews the dangers and inconsistencies inherent in both perspectives. The author demonstrates that the evolving responsibility to protect principle can be recruited to support a wide range of irreconcilable projects, from those of cosmopolitan constitutionalism to those of hegemonic international law. However, despite the dangers posed by this susceptibility to conceptual hijacking, Oman argues that the responsibility to protect, like human rights, is an essential a modern emancipatory formation. To remedy this dangerous malleability, the author advocates a third, distinctive interpretation of the responsibility to protect designed to limit its cooptation by liberal anti-pluralist and hegemonic international law agendas. Oman outlines the key features of such a minimalist conception, and explores its fit with the "RtoP" version of the responsibility to protect promoted in recent years by the UN. The author argues that two crucial features missing from the UN reading of the principle should be developed in future: an acknowledgement of the role of non-state actors as bearers of the responsibility to protect, and a recognition of the principle's legal character. Both of these aspects of the principle offer means to democratize the international law-making enterprise.

This book will consider a rapidly emerging guiding general principle in international relations and, arguably, in international law: the Responsibility to Protect. This principle is a solution proposed to a key preoccupation in both international relations and international law scholarship: how the international community is to respond to mass atrocities within sovereign States. There are three facets to this responsibility; the responsibility to prevent; the responsibility to react, and the responsibility to rebuild. This doctrine will be analysed in light of the parallel development of customary and treaty international legal obligations imposing responsibilities on sovereign states to the international community in key international law fields such as international human rights law, international criminal law and international environmental law. These new developments demand academic study and this book fills this lacuna by rigorously considering all of these developments as part of a trend towards assumption of international responsibility. This must include the responsibility on the part of all states to respond to threats of genocide, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansings and large-scale war crimes. The discussion surrounding aggravated state responsibility is also explored, with the author concluding that this emerging norm within international law is closely related to the responsibility to protect in its imposition of an international responsibility to act in response to an international wrong. This book will be of great interest to scholars on international law, the law of armed conflict, security studies and IR in general.

This Handbook offers a comprehensive examination of the Responsibility to Protect norm in world politics, which aims to end mass atrocities against civilians. The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is amongst the most significant norms in global politics. As the authoritative guide to R2P, this edited volume gathers together the most respected and insightful voices to address key issues related to this emerging norm. The contributing authors do this over the course of three parts: Part I: The Concept of R2P Part II: Developing and Operationalising R2P Part III: The view from Over Here This book will be of much interest to students of R2P, humanitarian intervention, genocide, human rights, international law, peace studies, international organisations, security studies and IR.

After having been introduced by the Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) in 2001 and after its affirmation by the UN World Summit in 2005 the concept of R2P has found broad approval both by international law doctrine and practice. It is fair to say that international law thinking has been profoundly influenced by this new approach. Nonetheless, many questions in this regard are still open. In this volume international lawyers discuss a series of fundamental aspect of R2P: the historical dimension, the relationship between R2P and general international law and the dynamics surrounding this concept. In particular it will be examined in which direction this concept will probably evolve. Contributors are: Alex Bellamy, Enzo Cannizzaro, Martina Caroni, Thomas Cottier, Hans-Georg Dederer, Fernand de Varennes, Oliver Diggelmann, Caro Focarelli, Andrea Gattini, Hans-Joachim Heintze, Peter Hilpold, Karolina Januszewski, Stefan Kadelbach, Federico Lenzerini, Manfred Nowak, Karin Oellers-Frahm, Nadakavukren Scheffer, Peter-Tobias Stoll, and Lotta Viikari