13 August 2013

Fifth Secretary-General Report on the Responsibility to Protect: State responsibility and prevention

The UN Secretary-General published his fifth report on the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) entitled ‘Responsibility to protect: State responsibility and prevention’. The term state responsibility refers to primary legal and moral obligations, including both national efforts and international efforts to assist other states. 

The report offers an overview of risk factors and considers how states can increase their capacity to prevent by offering different policy options, such as the establishment of partnerships for prevention. In the conclusion, the Secretary-General refers to the ‘collective failure to prevent atrocity crimes in the Syrian Arab Republic’ and the moral burden this places on the UN and member states, ‘in particular those who have primary responsibility for international peace and security’.

Source: Responsibility to protect: State responsibility and prevention | Report of the Secretary-General | A/67/929–S/2013/399 | 9 July 2013

14 June 2013

‘The Allocation of International Human Rights Duties (and Responsibilities) to Multiple Duty-bearers’, A Discussion of Samantha Besson’s SHARES Lecture

During a SHARES lecture on 6 June, Prof. Samantha Besson presented a recently published chapter on the allocation of international human rights duties and responsibilities for human rights in SHARES context. Building on the work of Henry Shue, among others, she offers a theory to bring our understanding of the supply side of human rights to the next level. Due to the complexity of this task, other human rights theorists have so far largely resorted to pragmatic and strategic reasoning instead of forwarding a morally coherent approach. Besson clarifies the steps to be taken as: (i) identification of human rights duties (ii) identification and justification of human rights duty-bearers; and (iii) allocation of human rights duties to human rights duty-bearers. (more…)