Law - Responsibility to Protect Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

Law - Responsibility to Protect - Essay Example During this occasion, all member states agreed to be held accountable for crimes against humanity such as mass killings, genocide, and ethnic cleansing. The principle of R2P is anchored on the responsibility of the state to protect its population from large-scale man-made atrocities. When the state is either incapable of or unwilling to fulfil this obligation, then the responsibility passes to the international community. The latter should first explore diplomatic persuasion and other similarly peaceful avenues to avert or arrest the catastrophe. Should these means fail, then the use of coercive force is justified in order to intervene in the interest of the oppressed population (America, 2009). Since the launching of R2P, there have been instances where countries were clearly remiss in the observance of this accountability. There had been mass killings and other widespread violation of human rights, which in turn led to a decimation of a large number of the population in Bosnia, Cam bodia, Darfur, Kosovo, and in the eastern portion of the Democratic Republic of Congo (America, 2009). There have likewise been fresh initiatives in the implementation of R2P. In January 2009, the Global Civil Society Coalition on the Responsibility to Protect was launched. ... Human Rights (UDHR), which was adopted and proclaimed on December 10, 1948 by the UN General Assembly, is the founding document of the international law of human rights (Renee Cronin-Furman, 2010); the UDHR is in turn founded on the principle that â€Å"the protection of human rights knows no international boundaries† (Buergenthal, 1997:704), and therefore an obligation exists for any and all members of the international community to ascertain that governments guarantee their protection over their people. A conceptual conflict exists between the doctrine of state sovereignty and non-intervention and the doctrine of human intervention. Classical political realism stresses the dominance of the sovereign state as the principal actor by which rights are created and given effect, and human relationships regulated. Humanitarian intervention, on the other hand, is a relatively new concept, a product of normative discourse because it infuses values into the appreciation of the human c ondition, and espouses certain norms held to be morally right over that which is morally wrong. The doctrine of state sovereignty is firmly embodied as policy in the UN Charter; in contrast, the Charter made no mention of the right of humanitarian intervention in any of its provisions, although humanitarian intervention likewise poses a challenge to state sovereignty. However, despite the lack of any explicit acknowledgement of the doctrine, the Security Council had always incorporated the implicit right to intervene, even with the use of military force, for humanitarian reasons in its decision-making, such as the resolutions it adopted in the case of Korea in 1950 and the Congo in 1962. The rationale of the concept is well elucidated by Thakur (2003) when he wrote: â€Å"Intervention for human