UNITED NATIONS - / MaximsNews Network / 15 June 2009 - In 2005, the World Summit endorsed the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle, which reconceives of state sovereignty as the responsibility to protect citizens from human rights atrocities, and most controversially, endorses international intervention as a last resort if states fail or refuse to comply with that responsibility.

However, implementation is proving more problematic, with sceptics in the developing world viewing R2P as an inadvertent incitement to armed uprising at best, or a "Trojan Horse" of Western imperialism at worst. Moreover, there is widespread feeling that some countries are resiling from previous commitments made in this regard.

On 9-10 March 2009, the Fundación para las Relaciones Internacionales y el Diálogo Exterior (FRIDE) and Intermón Oxfam, with the cooperation of the Canadian and British Embassies in Spain, brought together a number of experts to discuss R2P and its implementation, what can be done to facilitate that process, what obstacles it faces, and what R2P's prospects are as an international norm of the future.

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Douglas Wilson (Edinburgh) is a translator who has been living and working in Madrid for more than a decade. He has a degree in politics from the University of Glasgow and works regularly for think-tanks like FRIDE and The European Council on Foreign Relations.  

FRIDE is a think tank based in Madrid that aims to provide the best and most innovative thinking on Europe’s role in the international arena. It strives to break new ground in its core research interests of peace and security, human rights, democracy promotion, and development and humanitarian aid, and mould debate in governmental and non-governmental bodies through rigorous analysis, rooted in the values of justice, equality and democracy.