Reflectiing on Ukraine: The Responsibility to Protect (R2P)

Reflecting on the Developments in Ukraine

Tom Kaydor

9 March 14

The Responsibility to Protect (R2P or RtoP) is an emerging norm that sovereignty is not a right, but that states must protect their populations from mass atrocity crimes—namely genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and ethnic cleansing. The R2P has three foundation "pillars":

1.        A state has a responsibility to protect its population from genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing.

2.       The international community has a responsibility to assist the state to fulfill its primary responsibility.

3.        If the state manifestly fails to protect its citizens from the four above mass atrocities and peaceful measures have failed, the international community has the responsibility to intervene through coercive measures such as economic sanctions. Military intervention is considered the last resort.

While R2P is a norm and not a law, it is firmly grounded in international law, especially the laws relating to sovereignty, peace and security, human rights and armed conflict. R2P provides a framework for using tools that already exist, i.e. mediation, early warning mechanisms, economic sanctioning, and chapter VII powers, to prevent mass atrocities. Civil society organizations, states, regional organizations, and international institutions all have a role to play in the R2P process. The authority to employ the last resort and intervene militarily rests solely with United Nations Security Council.

Criticisms of the R2P include a "moral outrage and hysteria [that] often serve as a pretext for ‘interventions of the civilized world’ and ‘humanitarian interventions’, which often conceal the true strategic motives, and it thus becomes another name for proxy wars.

With the above background, I think Russia’s move is to prevent further deterioration of the situation in Ukraine especially where some of the Russian speaking peoples are targets of a systematic plan for possible elimination. Now that these Russian speaking people are beginning to express reunion with Russia, it is important for the international community to respect their rights to self-determination, freedom, et al. as have been done in the cases of South Sudan, and other regions where plebiscites have been conduct to give the people the voice to determine their own destinies. 

 

The R2P philosophy has driven big powers like the US, Britain, France, etc. to intervene in conflicts unilaterally (not waiting for approval from the UNSC).  We saw that in Kuwait, Iraq,  et al.