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The Responsibility to Protect

(Montreal Gazette-Canada) Irwin Cotler - Russia and China vetoed UN Security Council efforts to stop the bloodshed in Syria on the same day that Syrian forces killed 200 people in Homs. The total death toll now stands at more than 7,000 persons murdered by shelling, indiscriminate sniper fire, artillery fire targeting civilian neighborhoods, and now rocket attacks and even the gunning down of people at funerals. Witnesses also tell of the wanton killing and torture of children, detainees and hospital residents - in short, the slaughter of innocents. At the UN World Summit in 2005, more than 150 heads of state and government unanimously adopted a declaration on the Responsibility to Protect, authorizing international collective action "to protect (a state's) population from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity" if that state is unable or unwilling to protect its citizens, or worse, as in the case of Syria, if that state is the author of such criminality. It is our collective responsibility to ensure R2P is not empty rhetoric, but an effective instrument for preventing mass atrocity, for protecting people, and for securing human rights. The writer, a former minister of justice and attorney general of Canada, is the co-editor of The Responsibility to Protect: The Promise of Stopping Mass Atrocities in our Time (Oxford University Press, 2011).
2012-02-10 00:00:00
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