Resposibility to Protect ( R2P )

The Responsibility to Protect (“RtoP” or “R2P”) is a new international security and human rights norm to address the international community’s failure to prevent and stop genocides, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.

 Origin

This concept grew out of genocide and ethnic cleansing in Rwanda and Srebrenica in the 1990s.

The doctrine of the responsibility to protect was first elaborated in 2001 by a group of prominent international human rights leaders comprising the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. Under their mandate, the Commission sought to undertake the two-fold challenge of reconciling the international community's responsibility to address massive violations of humanitarian norms and ensuring respect for the sovereign rights of nation states.The "responsibility to protect" doctrine received renewed emphasis in 2004 when the United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan created the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change. The Panel was established to identify major threats facing the international community in the broad field of peace and security and to generate new ideas about policies and institutions aimed at preventing or confronting these challenges.The panel suggested collective international responsibility to protect, exercisable by the Security Council authorizing military intervention as a last resort, in the event of genocide and other large scale killing, ethnic cleansing or serious violations of international humanitarian law which sovereign Governments have proved powerless or unwilling to prevent.

In September 2005, R2P was once again enlivened, this time with the full support of the international community. At the 60th session of the U.N. General Assembly gathering, 191 heads of state and government representatives unanimously endorsed a resolution supporting the Responsibility to Protect doctrine. This resolution laid the foundations for a new global moral compact between every State and every population on earth. As adopted, atrocity crimes , genocide, crimes against humanity (including ethnic cleansing) and war crimes - were considered a universal concern and therefore were responsibility of the international community.

This commitment, entitled the Responsibility to Protect, is based on the idea that sovereignty is not a right, but a responsibility.

It stipulates that :

• The State carries the primary responsibility for protecting populations from genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing, and their incitement.
• The international community has a responsibility to encourage and assist States in fulfilling this responsibility.
• The international community has a responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other means to protect populations from these crimes. If a State is manifestly failing to protect its populations, the international community must be prepared to take collective action to protect populations, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.

India’s position :

India is in support of the R2P concept but it considers many a unilateral actions by the Western powesr in the recent past unjustified.

India recently told a United Nations meeting on R2P concept that Western air strikes on Libya were a complete violation of the U.N. Security Council’s resolution number 1973.

The fundamental aspects of the concept as India sees them are as follows:

1.  R2P cannot be used to address all social evils, including violations of human rights and humanitarian law.  Rather it must only be confined to the four identified crimes, i.e., genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity.  
2. The default response of the international community cannot be coercive measures under Chapter VII of the Charter.
3. In reality R2P cannot be seen as a pretext for humanitarian intervention. 
4. R2P also cannot turn out to be a tool legitimizing big power intervention on the pretext of protecting populations from the violations of human rights and humanitarian law. 
5. It cannot be seen as codifying a system of coercion, providing a tool in the hands of powerful governments to judge weaker states, and encourage regime change primarily on political considerations.
6. Armed intervention can be a measure of last resort when everything else has failed. Selectivity must be avoided at all cost and the principle must be applied uniformly to all parties to a conflict.
7. The implementation of R2P requires an effective discharge of responsibility and obligations by states under the U.N. Charter in a balanced and impartial manner.