Legal Preconditions for Armed Intervention in the Responsibility to Protect Concept: Remarks de lege lata and de lege ferenda

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to analyse the legal conditions of armed intervention under the concept of Responsibility to Protect (R2P). The author presented and assessed the effectiveness of undertaking military actions within its framework. It should be emphasized that the armed aspect of the R2P concept has not been broadly analysed in the doctrine. The author discussed the issues of the effectiveness of military intervention on the example of the “Odyssey Dawn” and “Unified Protector” operations in Libya in 2011. He also referred to the concept of applying the military intervention mechanism to the Syrian Arab Republic after 2011. The text indicates that the greatest weakness is the generality of the concept of armed intervention within the R2P concept and the vagueness of its forms of implementation. In the context of the military intervention in Libya, which occurred as a result of the lack of veto by one of the permanent members of the Security Council, the author showed that although the use of the formula of military intervention under the R2P model is possible, it is also reasonable to assume that in the near future in a similar situation, the permanent members of the Security Council will exercise their right of veto.

Keywords

• responsibility to protect
• r2p
• armed intervention
• security council
• libyan civil war
• syrian conflict