Η ευθύνη για προστασία: εργαλείο ιμπεριαλιστικής επέμβασης ή πλαίσιο προάσπισης της ανθρώπινης ασφάλειας;

Abstract

This article provides a comprehensive review of the concept of‘responsibility to protect’. It confirms that this concept has become central to the debate on the relationship between sovereignty and human security within the discipline of international relations, while it has been successfully introduced in UN documents and discourse. Nevertheless, the responsibility to protect has not additionally been consolidated as a universally accepted international norm. The author supports that this concept is not as such either an instrument of the imperialism of the great powers or a politically neutral framework for the protection of human security. The responsibility to protect will probably not legitimize more, otherwise ambivalent, interventions. Nor will it necessarily give new impetus to the humanitarianism of member-states. Under the current circumstances, it seems that the international community will keep deciding on a case-by-case and context-specific basis its intervention to third countries, simultaneously affirming or transforming the content that it ascribes to the responsibility to protect. Therefore, it is argued that the responsibility to protect will eventually imply for the states what the latter in practice choose to make of its content.