R2P and the UN.

• Author: Cremades, Beatriz Escrina
• Position: Responsibility to Protect; United Nations

More than a decade has passed since Nelson Mandela, in his capacity as President of the Republic of South Africa, addressed the Heads of State and Government of the then Organization of African Unity (OAU). In his speech, he focused on one of the biggest dilemmas the world had been facing since the end of the Cold War: should outside forces intervene in the internal affairs of a state when the civilian population is suffering massive violations of human rights and the state is unable or unwilling to fulfil its responsibility to protect its own people? Although his message was conveyed to those present in Ouagadougou, its essence can be extended to the entire international community.

With the fall of the iron curtain and the end of the Cold War, the dynamics of international politics began experiencing a series of changes. Gradually, the classical war between nations turned into a series of conflicts characterized by continuous attacks against non-combatant civilians within nations, with no clear boundaries, with no respect for international laws, and where violence resulted in the displacement of thousands of people every year. Internal and regional conflicts involved different kinds of actors, deprived people of their basic human rights, and put at stake the lives of the most vulnerable. As time passed, and with the tragic events in Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo engraved in people's minds, some of the main pillars of the Westphalia system were brought into question and, with them, the principles of sovereignty and non-interference.

Trying to move away from the controversial notion of the droit d'ingerence of the 1990s, the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) norm sought to recast the issue in terms of responsibility and protection rather than of the right to intervene. The prospect was that a state's failure to protect its own citizens would no longer be seen, as in the past, as no one else's business, but as the entire world's concern; it was a straightforward answer to never again. During the 2005 United Nations World Summit, a restrictive and narrow understanding of R2P, based on the report on this norm by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, was agreed upon by world leaders. The report stated that each individual state had the responsibility to protect its population from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. The document also highlighted that the international community...