| Summary: | The context for this work is set by the proliferation of intrastate conflicts and the international
legal debate of humanitarian intervention. The thesis specifically addresses the concept of the
“Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) as formulated by the International Commission on Intervention
and State Sovereignty (ICISS). The objective is to assess the present quality of R2P as a concept
of international law.
Five components of the R2P framework are discussed: the primary responsibility of every state
to protect its population from large-scale killings and large-scale ethnic cleansing; the right of
other states to collective humanitarian intervention through the United Nations; a right of
unilateral humanitarian intervention without prior Security Council authorization; the
responsibility of the international community to take military action; and the criteria for external
military involvement.
Methodologically, the analysis is grounded in the dominant theory of legal positivism and its
doctrine of sources, which requires notably an analysis of treaties and customary international
law. An ethical theory is devised and applied, however, to remedy inadequacies of a strictly
positivist method that sets out to determine international law solely on the basis of hard facts.
These ethical considerations serve as a background theory to provide guidance in difficult cases
of treaty or customary law analysis, and they fill gaps in positive international law as legally
binding “principles of ethical law”.
In conclusion, the individual components of R2P differ in terms of their legal status and the
degree to which it can be explained by the traditional posivist approach to international law. The
primary responsibility of every state has become accepted as a hard norm of international
customary law; the right of collective humanitarian intervention is provided for in Chapter VII of
the UN Charter; a right of unilateral humanitarian intervention has become part of the
international legal system as a “principle of ethical law”; the residual responsibility of the
international community is a principle of “legal soft law”; finally, positive international law
defines no criteria delineating the permissible and required use of force for the protection of
foreign populations. === Law, Faculty of === Graduate
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