The Responsibility to Protect: The Wrong Battles and the Right Questions

The 2005 World Summit of Heads of States and Governments has adopted by consensus the principle of the international responsibility of each State to protect his own population against crimes of war, crimes against humanity, crime of genocide and ethnic cleaning. Since this moment, responsibility to protect which is widely supported by a large part of the international community, but has also many critics, is a matter of reflection in the United Nations arena.
The subject matter of this contribution is to point out and discuss the questions and difficulties of the application of this principle, at different moments, like prevention of mass crimes or reaction to them, from the point of view of the territorial State, first and principally concerned, as well as from the point of view of international community, the subsidiary subject of responsibility to protect. The recent intervention in Libya has largely proved the necessity to precise at what conditions it is possible to implement the responsibility to protect.