Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.21857/yl4okf3jj9
Responsibility to Protect (R2P) in the Circumstances of Trans-border Terrorism: eadem sed aliter ?
Davorin Lapaš
; Pravni fakultet Sveučilišta u Zagrebu, Zagreb, Hrvatska
Abstract
Unlike the idea of so-called ‘humanitarian intervention’ based mostly on morality, the R2P concept, from its very beginning in the early 2000s, has been concentrated on the legal responsibility of State for the protection of fundamental human rights of all the people in its territory. Consequently, the R2P concept provided for subsidiarily the same responsibility for other States in the case when the State that has been primarily responsible could be unwilling or unable to protect these rights by its own. Although the ICISS confirmed in its work that no enforcement action should be taken without the authorization of the UN Security Council, almost every unilateral use of force in the following years invoked the R2P concept.
In the UN legal system the unilateral use of force could be legal only in the form of individual or collective self-defense as provided for in Art. 51 of the UN Charter in the case of an armed attack, i.e. in response to aggression, which according to the UN Security Council resolutions terrorist acts are not. This being so, the only reaction to the terrorist acts launched from the territory of another State could be collective measures, or in practice some kind of peace-keeping operations as a reaction to the 'threat to the peace', but subject to approval of that State. Unfortunately, one should not be an annoying skeptic to put a question whether the UN would always be able to act in time or would the world organization stay trapped by its sluggishness, indecision, but essentially by the irreconcilable interests of its most powerful member States.
In these circumstances, would it be possible for a State that certainly knows and could prove before an independent international authority the imminent threat of terrorist attacks (some of them maybe have already happened before) to use force against the terrorists in the territory of the neighbor State that is unable or unwilling to resist them on its own? Would thereby the intervening State equally assume its ‘responsibility to protect’ life and other fundamental rights of its citizens?
After all, if the other States’ intervention in the territory of a State that seriously violates the fundamental and universally protected human rights could be justified by the R2P concept in the meaning of their ‘subsidiary’ responsibility, why would any State be deprived to protect the same rights of its own citizens in the same way as its primary responsibility?
Keywords
Responsibility to Protect (R2P); trans-border terrorism; use of force
Hrčak ID:
213841
URI
Publication date:
23.11.2018.
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