Global Responsibility to Protect 1 (2009) 10–21
www.brill.nl/gr2p
Sovereignty, Choice, and the Responsibility to Protect Edward C. Luck luck@ipinst.org Received 11 November 2008, accepted 15 November 2008
Abstract It is commonly asserted that the chief obstacle to advancing acceptance of the responsibility to protect (RtoP) is the reluctance of developing countries to compromise their sovereignty. This paper argues, instead, that both developing and some of the more powerful developed countries have concerns about the implications of RtoP for their sovereignty. The former are more likely to be concerned about territorial sovereignty and the latter about decision-making sovereignty. Both sets of concerns were openly expressed during the debates leading up to the consensus at the 2005 World Summit on RtoP. That consensus was facilitated by the fact that the wording of the relevant provisions of its Outcome Document took both types of reservations about sovereignty into account. The paper argues that the recognition that countries of the North and the South tend to be more united than divided by their determination to preserve their sovereignty should facilitate efforts to achieve consensus on how to operationalise and implement the responsibility to protect. Keywords sovereignty, United Nations Charter, UN World Summit 2005, North-South debate, UN General Assembly, UN Security Council, Westphalian sovereignty, Non-Aligned Movement, RtoP Lite
Introduction It has become a common refrain to assert that the responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity presents a challenge to traditional conceptions of state sovereignty.1 1
It is not the place of this essay either to define the components of RtoP or to chronicle its development. These tasks are accomplished, however, in two recent RtoP volumes: Gareth Evans, The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and For All (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2008) and Alex J. Bellamy, A Responsibility to Protect: The Global Effort to End Mass Atrocities (Cambridge: Polity, forthcoming 2008). © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009
DOI 10.1163/187598409X405451