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March 21, 2011
The UN intervention into Libya comes under the Responsibility to Protect; namely that the international community has a responsibility to intervene in crisis situations if the State is failing its responsibility to protect its population
The UN's concept of responsibility to protect is a norm or set of principles based on the idea that sovereignty is not a privilege, but a responsibility developed in response to the genocide in Rwanda and the deliberate targeting of civilians in Kosovo and Srebrenica. Since these crises, a series of governmental and non-governmental initiatives have focused on reconciling traditional notions of state sovereignty with the moral imperative to act -- with force if necessary -- in the face of genocide and crimes against humanity. The Responsibility to Protect concept is a valuable framework for building international consensus around the legitimate use of force to halt large-scale attacks on civilians.
The Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) focuses on preventing and halting four crimes: genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing. The responsibility to protect can be thought of as having three parts.
(1) A State has a responsibility to protect its population from genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing (mass atrocities).
(2) If the State is unable to protect its population on its own, the international community has a responsibility to assist the state by building its capacity. This can mean building early-warning capabilities, mediating conflicts between political parties, strengthening the security sector, mobilizing standby forces, and many other actions.
(3) If a State is manifestly failing to protect its citizens from mass atrocities and peaceful measures are not working, the international community has the responsibility to intervene at first diplomatically, then more coercively, and as a last resort, with military force.
According to its advocates the concept of Responsibility to Protect captures a simple and powerful idea. The primary responsibility for protecting its own people from mass atrocity crimes lies with the state itself. State sovereignty implies responsibility, not a license to kill. But when a state is unwilling or unable to halt or avert such crimes, the wider international community then has a collective responsibility to take whatever action is necessary.
R2P emphasizes preventive action above all. That includes assistance for states struggling to contain potential crises and for effective rebuilding after a crisis or conflict to tackle its underlying causes. R2P's primary tools are persuasion and support, not military or other coercion. But sometimes it is right to fight: faced with another Rwanda, the world cannot just stand by.
In a debate on the concept in 2009 Noam Chomsky observed:
The general principles of R2P that don't seem to me controversial...The question that is controversial is how the right of forceful intervention is interpreted, and, as I mentioned, that is controversial, there's difference of opinion, and also, in general, how it's going to be implemented. So will there be, in fact, an implementation of R2P right now that takes account of protected populations - a specific responsibility of the United Nations - who are being subjected to gross violations of fundamental human rights? Will it be applied to protect the children of the world in particular the children of southern Africa alone, who are dying daily at the rate of Rwanda, not for a hundred days but every day, and its getting worse because of [the] refusal of Western countries to do anything. So will the R2P apply to that? In fact, it's always the selectivity and the implementation that is at issue.
A classic example of 'protected populations', of a civilian population being collectively punished by policies that amount to a Crime Against Humanity, is the Palestinian people Gaza strip. However, R2P doesn't apply because the U.S. is backing the destruction of Gaza so therefore R2P doesn't apply; it's very simple.And it's not just Gaza, it's also the West Bank.
Richard Falk argues that Responsibility to Protect is subject to the political will of the powerful sovereign states, the powerful members of the United Nations, especially the U.S., and it just reinforces the understanding that geopolitics is primary and takes precedence over international law in those cases where the interests of the most significant members of the UN are engaged.
This invites the criticism of the UN as being subject to this geopolitical discipline, and [being] appropriately accused of double standards, of applying international law to the weak but excepting the strong consistent with the impunity that the leaders of powerful countries have while weaker leaders are prosecuted for their criminal conduct.
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