An Analysis of the United Nations Security Council"™s Resolutions within the Framework of the Principle of "Responsibility to Protect"

Abstract

This paper explores the apparently fairness of the United Nations"™ collective security system, through an indicator: the attention paid, in terms of amount of resolutions, by the Security Council to the major episodes of political violence within the second half of twentieth century where the principle of "responsibility to protect" should have been activated. This study, however, is embedded into a wider context: the social conditions which allowed for the emergence of the modern State. The underlying thesis points out that those same conditions had to be present at the international before a global organism with real capacity to order the world may appear. Along this line of thought, the paper resorts to the experience of the Human Rights Effectiveness Institute in the process of developing a human rights effectiveness index.