New interpretation of sovereignty

After the World War Two, the World has been facing different human rights breaches which cannot be resolved only by a single state, no matter how powerful it is. These human rights breaches include: genocide, ethnic-cleansing and other mass-atrocities are to be considered ‘problems without passport’. Nations ‘face threats that no nation can resolve by acting alone and opportunities that can be exploited if all nations work together’. In the same time these issues have raised other important issues and debates and tensions between the protection of human rights in one side and sovereignty on the other side. The question that has been raised is which of them should prevail? It was the Canadian Government in 2001 which sponsored the International Commission on Intervention (ICISS). One of the main aims of this commission was the creation of a new normative framework in order to justify military interventions in case of mass-atrocities, in order to ensure that the situation of Rwanda or ‘Kosovo’97 will not be repeated again. It was the initiator of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle which was first formulated by the International Commission on Intervention (ICISS) in 2001. It was a significant step toward the changes of the UN’s legal framework in line with the changes of reality. In 2005 world leaders agreed that all states had the responsibility to protect their citizens, and if any state fails to do so, than it is a duty of the international community to protect people against violation of human rights, atrocities etc. The reason why the authors have chosen this topic is because Responsibility to Protect invokes one of the most important norms of the contemporarily international law; it is the operating language in case of humanitarian crises; and also it is the main argument of political and legal debates.