The Responsibility to Protect (R2P): a death in embryo

However, this is a slight misreading of history. The Libyan intervention was authorised under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, the exact same provision that various other interventions had been authorised under, prior to the establishment of R2P; significantly, Russia, China, India and Brazil all chose to abstain from the Security Council vote; the relevant UN resolution made no explicit mention of R2P; and neither of the two key public justifications - Barack Obama's keynote speech, and the co-authored joint-statement by Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron – made any reference to R2P. Yet despite all of this, at least there was still an intervention by which R2P could be graded.

This was more than could be said for the vast majority of post-R2P conflicts: long running humanitarian crises in Darfur, Somalia, Guinea, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Gaza strip, Zimbabwe, and North Korea remained either entirely unaddressed or demonstrably under-resourced.

And things were only getting worse for the fledgling doctrine: R2P was deliberately misappropriated by France whilst trying to intervene in Myanmar in order to address the aftermath of a cyclone; it was used as a Trojan Horse by Russia in order to justify their annexation of South Ossetia; and Tony Blair tried to use R2P in order to retrospectively justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

These failures were, in many ways, predictable – R2P was never quite as ground-breaking as it seemed. Designed to be a pathway beyond the enduring barrier of state sovereignty, R2P was in many ways addressing a challenge that did not exist.

Sovereignty may have been a sacrosanct ideal – something built-up to the level of inviolability by an ever increasing crescendo of emotional sentiment – yet it has always been limited in theory, and routinely violated in practice: (1) be it through the plain meaning of the UN Charter; (2) the rulings of the International Court of Justice; (3) as a result of bi-lateral agreements and treaties; (4) following the development of international law and human rights legislation such as the Genocide Convention; (5) through the normative implications of universal jurisdiction as outlined in the formation of the International Criminal Court and International Criminal Tribunals; (6) and importantly, as a consequence of international precedent, such as with the creation of the no-fly zone over Iraqi-Kurdistan.

This would go some way to explaining the deep, palpable confusion that existed around R2P from its conception. Indeed an immediate disconnect formed between the theoretical meaning of the doctrine and what countries believed they were actually signing up to – with splits forming between those who thought that they had not authorised R2P in any capacity, those who thought they had accepted the World Summit document, and those who thought they were also bound by the originally commissioned R2P pamphlet.

And this last distinction is more than academic: the World Summit document represented a significant linguistic watering down of the original R2P document. The category of violence that R2P was to address had been increased; the threshold beyond which a country would be considered as failing in its R2P responsibilities was also increased; the criteria for justifying military intervention was completely expunged; and, after widespread objections, the word "obligation" was entirely removed from the document.

After these changes, the World Summit version of R2P – the version that was internationally accepted (at least in principle) – did nothing more than reiterate a list of already commonly established principles. Viciously diluted, then still only sparsely accepted, R2P existed as an ambiguous, and above all else, entirely meaningless doctrine: a disingenuous approach that brought the Chairman of the original report, Gareth Evans, to accuse the international community of having "buyer's remorse".

What was becoming increasingly clear, was that by the time of R2P's birth by means of international consensus, it was, in fact, already dead. This can be seen in the enduring humanitarian crises in Syria and Iraq - if R2P was to mean anything it would have to mean something here.

Yet, as peaceful protests were first suppressed by the Syrian government, then when civil war erupted, and later as groups such as Islamic State began to annex territory – violence that has since spread to large parts of Iraq – the type of humanitarian intervention that R2P mandated has been entirely absent.

Rather, what has manifested is an international response entirely comprised of aerial bombing – and with the explicit promise of 'no boots on the ground'. Effectively, the international community is willing to intervene if, and only if, it comes at no human cost to the intervening countries. R2P was designed to defend certain values - the basic human rights of all people, regardless of citizenship – yet what worth can these values have, if they are only defended after impunity is guaranteed?

Worse still, even with such a restricted and inadequate intervention, the language of R2P was conspicuously missing. Whereas R2P could once have been criticised for being nothing more than a catch-phrase without any substance to back it up, it was now not even that.

Originally championed as a bridge between our best moral concerns and the action required to address them, it is hard to shake-off the impression that R2P, from its inception, never really existed – that rather than merely having a short shelf-life, in reality there was simply nothing there to begin with.

The tragedy here is not specifically the failure of R2P as a doctrine, but rather it is the gap that is left in the international landscape – as explained by Gareth Evans and his Co-chairman for the original R2P report, Mohamed Sahnoun, "It is only a matter of time before reports emerge again from somewhere of massacres, mass starvation, rape, and ethnic cleansing. And then the question will arise again in the Security Council, in political capitals, and in the media: What do we do?"