The Hill News

In Libya, a tyrant turned his guns on his own people. The U.N. Security Council invoked the “responsibility to protect” and endorsed international military intervention to save the Libyan people from an imminent massacre.

In Syria, a tyrant has turned his guns on his own people. The U.N. Security Council is struggling to even formally condemn the actions that have left 1,400 people dead, according to human-rights groups, and led to some 4,000 Syrian refugees crossing the border into Turkey.

So whatever happened to R2P, as the doctrine has become known? R2P found its way into the history books in September 2005 when a world summit at the U.N. General Assembly declared that the international community should be ready to intervene if leaders are “manifestly failing to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.”

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