Responsibility to protect - En analys av skyldigheten att skydda

Sammanfattning: Humanitarian interventions, that is to say military interventions in a state, without its permission, to protect the population’s human rights, have during the past decades been controversial. The advocates of the interventions regard it as everyone’s duty to help humans in need. The interventions’ critics argue that the interventions are a violation of one cornerstone of the international law, the principle of non-intervention. In 2001, International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty introduced the report The responsibility to protect. The report is based on the notion of a primary and a secondary responsibility to protect the human rights. According to the report, each and every state has a primary responsibility to protect its population. If the state in question is unwilling or unable to fulfil this responsibility, the international community has a secondary responsibility to assist the state to protect its population. In order to be able to unite Responsibility to protect with state sovereignty, a more modern definition of sovereignty is used in the report. According to this definition the state is required to look after its population’s human rights, for the sovereignty to be legitimate. In 2005, Responsibility to protect was adopted by the UN General Assembly, after the removal of several of the report’s key components. In Syria, one of the largest humanitarian crises of our time is taking place, with about half a million casualties. The Security Council has yet to authorize a military intervention to halt the crisis. The aim of this essay is to analyse the role of the Responsibility to protect doctrine in the international law and in relation to the conflict in Syria. In conclusion, this essay finds that the adopted version of the Responsibility to protect is a lot less far-reaching than the original report, and is today not much more than a vague political ambition. In the Security Council’s handling of the Syria conflict it is evident that realpolitik is still being prioritized over human rights.