scholarly journals The Responsibility to Protect Human Rights and the RtoP: Prospective and Retrospective Responsibility

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 142-166
Author(s):  
David Jason Karp
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Causal Link ◽  
Responsibility To Protect ◽  
Independent Contribution ◽  
International Responsibility ◽  
The Way

This article argues that—contrary to the way that it is often framed—the first pillar of the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) is not best understood as an instantiation of a broader international responsibility to protect human rights. Firstly, the RtoP reverts to a discourse of powerful savours and passive victims, which runs against advocates’ claim that the RtoP is a ‘rights-based norm’. Secondly, although it distinguishes between prevention and response, the RtoP is still fundamentally a discussion of retrospective responsibility. The responsibility to protect human rights, by contrast, is importantly prospective. The article’s separation of prospective/retrospective responsibility from the responsibility to prevent and to respond is an independent contribution, with broader significance beyond the RtoP context. Thirdly, the RtoP becomes activated when atrocity is building, imminent or underway; whereas the responsibility to protect human rights may be breached even without a clear causal link to harm.

Humanitarian Intervention

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Caplan
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Security Council ◽  
Future Development ◽  
Humanitarian Intervention ◽  
Responsibility To Protect ◽  
Real Effect ◽  
General Decline ◽  
Humanitarian Crises ◽  
Un Security Council ◽  
The Way

States – Western ones, at least – have given increased weight to human rights and humanitarian norms as matters of international concern, with the authorization of legally binding enforcement measures to tackle humanitarian crises under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. These concerns were also developed outside the UN Security Council framework, following Tony Blair’s Chicago speech and the contemporaneous NATO action over Kosovo. This gave rise to international commissions and resulted, among other things, in the emergence of the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) doctrine. The adoption of this doctrine coincided with a period in which there appeared to be a general decline in mass atrocities. Yet R2P had little real effect – it cannot be shown to have caused the fall in mass atrocities, only to have echoed it. Thus, the promise of R2P and an age of humanitarianism failed to emerge, even if the way was paved for future development.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Richard Beardsworth ◽  
Garrett Wallace Brown ◽  
Richard Shapcott
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
International Politics ◽  
International Community ◽  
First Century ◽  
Responsibility To Protect ◽  
Mass Atrocity ◽  
International Responsibility ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Atrocity Crimes ◽  
Political Vocabulary

The twenty-first century saw the emergence of a new doctrine of state and international responsibility in the form of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). This doctrine transforms, in principle, the moral and political vocabulary of international politics from one of traditional definitions of state and human rights to a broadened normative understanding of domestic and global responsibilities. The doctrine stipulates that states individually and collectively have responsibilities to protect their citizens and those of other states from mass atrocity crimes. In using this language the international community has formalized the idea that states, in addition to their rights, have responsibilities that are essentially cosmopolitan in that they are owed to people everywhere....

The South, the West, and the meanings of humanitarian intervention in history

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 514-533
Author(s):  
Patrick Quinton-Brown
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Third World ◽  
Humanitarian Intervention ◽  
Responsibility To Protect ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The South ◽  
The West ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

AbstractAs it has been written, the history of humanitarian intervention is all too Whiggish and all too white. By conceptualising humanitarian intervention in the way that they do, orthodox histories should be seen as entangled in debates about the origins of human rights but also, perhaps more crucially, debates about the various formations and reinventions of human rights. Alternative codifications of rights reveal the historical possibility of a Southern practice of what we would almost certainly call ‘humanitarian intervention’. The record of a radical Third World practice to save strangers from the atrocities of colonialism and extreme racism is also a record of Western states playing staunchly sovereigntist roles, of the West's late devotion to Westphalia. To sketch out such a counterhistory is to argue the following: at a threshold moment in the international-political life of the Responsibility to Protect, it is the terms, range, and domain of the intervention debate that must be re-formulated and re-evaluated.

Deconstructing Turkey’s “Open Door” Policy towards Refugees from Syria

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 209-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
Burcu Togral Koca
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Border Studies ◽  
Open Door ◽  
Open Door Policy ◽  
Security Framework ◽  
Liberal Policy ◽  
The Way

Turkey has followed an “open door” policy towards refugees from Syria since the March 2011 outbreak of the devastating civil war in Syria. This “liberal” policy has been accompanied by a “humanitarian discourse” regarding the admission and accommodation of the refugees. In such a context, it is widely claimed that Turkey has not adopted a securitization strategy in its dealings with the refugees. However, this article argues that the stated “open door” approach and its limitations have gone largely unexamined. The assertion is, here, refugees fleeing Syria have been integrated into a security framework embedding exclusionary, militarized and technologized border practices. Drawing on the critical border studies, the article deconstructs these practices and the way they are violating the principle of non-refoulement in particular and human rights of refugees in general. 

Comparative Views on the Right to Vote in International Law

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shai Dothan
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
International Law ◽  
National Courts ◽  
European Court ◽  
Right To Vote ◽  
The Right ◽  
Democratic Elections ◽  
The Way

There is a consensus about the existence of an international right to vote in democratic elections. Yet states disagree about the limits of this right when it comes to the case of prisoners’ disenfranchisement. Some states allow all prisoners to vote, some disenfranchise all prisoners, and others allow only some prisoners to vote. This chapter argues that national courts view the international right to vote in three fundamentally different ways: some view it as an inalienable right that cannot be taken away, some view it merely as a privilege that doesn’t belong to the citizens, and others view it as a revocable right that can be taken away under certain conditions. The differences in the way states conceive the right to vote imply that attempts by the European Court of Human Rights to follow the policies of the majority of European states by using the Emerging Consensus doctrine are problematic.

The Inviolability of Diplomatic Agents in the Context of Employment

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Rodgers
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Fair Trial ◽  
European Convention ◽  
Employment Contracts ◽  
Domestic Servants ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Diplomatic Immunity ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Way

‘Ordinary’ employment contracts—including those of domestic servants—have been deemed to attract diplomatic immunity because they fall within the scope of diplomatic functions. This chapter highlights the potential for conflict between these forms of immunity and the rights of the employees, and reflects on cases in which personal servants of diplomatic agents have challenged both the existence of immunity and the scope of its application. The chapter examines claims that the exercise of diplomatic immunity might violate the right to a fair trial under Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights and the way in which courts have dealt with these issues. The chapter analyses diplomats’ own employment claims and notes that they are usually blocked by the assertion of immunity, but also reflects on more recent developments in which claims had been considered which were incidental to diplomatic employment (eg Nigeria v Ogbonna [2012]).

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