Rethinking The Responsibility To Protect: Libya As A Case Study [before doctoral defense]

Kivonat, rövid leírás

In the aftermath of the controversy surrounding NATO’s 1999 intervention into Kosovo, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan (2000) asked, “if humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica, to gross and systematic violations of human rights that affect every precept of our common humanity?” (Annan, 2000). This question highlights the complex and often controversial nature of addressing mass violence and human rights abuses. The world watched in horror as countless lives were lost to mass atrocities and other crimes. History is abundant with examples of the international community standing by and doing nothing as innocent people have been murdered and otherwise persecuted on a massive scale. In fact, the United Nations (UN) and the international community witnessed recurrent failure to respond and intervene to protect vulnerable populations. As a response and in an attempt to fight for our “common humanity”, the Government of Canada established the interdisciplinary International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) in September 2000 which created the responsibility to protect doctrine (R2P), recognizing the responsibility of states to protect their populations, in a timely and decisive manner, from genocides, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity, as well as the responsibility of the international community to assist states in fulfilling this responsibility (International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, 2001; United Nations General Assembly, 2005). It is based on the “idea that sovereign states have a responsibility to protect their own citizens from avoidable catastrophes, from mass murder and rape, from starvation, but that when they are unwilling or unable to do so, that responsibility must be borne by the broader community of states” (ICISS, 2001, p. viii).