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The Responsibility Of Protecting ´

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The ´Responsibility to Protect´ (R2P) concept first came about in a 2001 report from the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), which was set up after, then Secretary General, Kofi Annan, said there needed to be some a change in the United Nations charter regarding military forces in humanitarian interventions. This came following the criticism of the NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999. The report further evolved into the concept that was approved in the UN’s General Assembly in 2005 (Evans 2014; Zyberi and Mason n.d. 2013: 7, 513). In 2009 the UN confirmed a continued endorsement of R2P under the formula of ‘three pillars and four crimes’ (Zyberi and Mason n.d. 2013: 10). The main issue with R2P has…show more content…
The review will then conclude with an article from Evans, who goes over the use of R2P through the years, where it stands today and compares the situations in Libya and Syria.
Even though R2P has been accepted in the UN General Assembly and is widely used in the literature of humanitarian issues, Zyberi and Mason point out that R2P is not a binding norm of international law although it does have a clear legal dimension to it. R2P is rather seen an international social, political and moral norm and even though it doesn’t prohibit unilateral humanitarian intervention it does not grant States a legal right to intervene (2013: 13-14). According to Zyberi and Mason’s analyses of the ‘State responsibility’ in the context of R2P, they find it to have several different meanings and vary according to which perspective it’s looked at from as the State and policies are influenced differently and the scope of obligations is different for a State’s individual and collective responsibility (2013: 32-33). The political framework of R2P is therefore based on fundamental principles of international law and epitomises the humanitarian character of those laws that have been put in place to protect people in the world and their right to peace. The institutional efforts, however, to operationalise R2P differ considerably from one organisation to another (2013: 511-512). Zyberi and Mason say that along with the problem of different understanding
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