The Responsibility to Protect - A Double Edged Sword?

The Responsibility to Protect –now put into the acronym R2P – has emerged as one of the most recent and contentious issues within the United Nations system. The programmatic concept goes back to a report with the same title presented in December 2001 by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. Its core principles focus on the right to humanitarian intervention. This assumes the implementation of a collective responsibility to intervene in states which fail, or are unwilling or
unable to, prevent its population from suffering serious harm as a result of internal war, insurgency, or repression. The decision, if and when the R2P is applicable, relates to the problem of who exercises the power of definition – especially so in the absence of an agreed framework offering clear criteria.

This conversation between the panelists and with the audience seeks to explore the opportunities and limitations of the concept within the United Nations when its member states remain deeply divided and polarised.

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Phyllis Bennis is is a fellow of both Transnational Institute, TNI, and the Insitute for Policy Studies in Washington DC. She is a journalist specialising in Middle East and United Nations issues. Formerly based at the United Nations, she has worked on US domination of the UN leading up to the Gulf War, economic sanctions on Iraq, international interventions and US foreign policy in the Middle East.

Fiona Dove is the Director of the TNI in Amsterdam. Before this, she worked for the Congress of South African Trade Unions for 10 years. She was also active in feminist and anti-militarist organisations affiliated with the United Democratic Front in South Africa during the 1980s and
holds degrees in Industrial Sociology and Development Studies.

Denis Halliday, originally from Ireland, has spent most of his over 30 year career with the United Nations in development and humanitarian assistance-related posts both in New York and overseas, primarily in South-East Asia. From 1997-98, he was the UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator in
Iraq, but resigned from this post over the economic sanctions imposed on Iraq. He holds an M.A. in Economics, Geography and Public Administration.

Henning Melber, Executive Director of the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation will chair the meeting.

For questions, please contact secretariat@dhf.uu.se or 018-410 10 00