Nicolas Rost/UNHCR
In 2005, the World Summit endorsed the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle, which reconceives of state sovereignty as the responsibility to protect citizens from human rights atrocities, and most controversially, endorses international intervention as a last resort if states fail or refuse to comply with that responsibility.
However, implementation is proving more problematic, with sceptics in the developing world viewing R2P as an inadvertent incitement to armed uprising at best, or a “Trojan Horse” of Western imperialism at worst. Moreover, there is widespread feeling that some countries are resiling from previous commitments made in this regard.
On 9-10 March 2009, the Fundación para las Relaciones Internacionales y el Diálogo Exterior (FRIDE) and Intermón Oxfam, with the cooperation of the Canadian and British Embassies in Spain, brought together a number of experts to discuss R2P and its implementation, what can be done to facilitate that process, what obstacles it faces, and what R2P’s prospects are as an international norm of the future.
The links between the realisation of human rights and the conservation of natural resources and biodiversity are receiving increasing attention worldwide. Experience has demonstrated that exclusionary approaches to conservation can undermine those same rights of affected communities and can undermine conservation objectives.
Developing societies emerging from conflict and authoritarianism are frequently beset by poverty, inequality, weak institutions and insecurity. The same countries are also often the scene of massive human rights violations, which leave in their wake victims who are marginalized – people who have strong claims to justice. Yet those who work to address the interconnected concerns of development and justice do not always work together to provide coherent responses to the needs of transitional societies.
Rubayat Ahsan
