TermPapersite

Responsibility to Protect

The Responsibility to Protect is a pledge by the United Nations’ member states to address the four primary areas that touch on fundamental human rights. In the 2005 UN World Summit, all members of the United Nations committed to preventing war crimes, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and crimes against humanity. The Responsibility to Protect was formulated to address the weaknesses in the UN’s security response to crime against humanity. For instance, the council failed to intervene during the 1994 Rwandan Genocide that claimed the lives of more than eight hundred thousand people within a hundred days (Arlin, 2017, p. 15). The United Nation’s Security Council was reluctant to approve the deployment of reinforcement to overstretch and underequipped Ghanaian forces in the country to stop the genocide (Arlin, 2017, p. 15). Thus, Responsibility to Act was formulated to avoid the repeat of such incidences. However, it has failed to achieve its objective and just mere rhetoric in the international system.