Madeline Albright, Lloyd Axworthy on R2P: Responsibility to Protect

Sovereignty implies the inalienable right of a country to protect itself, former U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright and former Canadian foreign affairs minister Lloyd Axworthy told University of Toronto students and staff at an international relations panel April 1. But this concept becomes challenging when sovereignty protects the perpetrators in the demise of its own people, such as during the Rwandan genocide 20 years ago and ethnic cleansing during the Bosnian war in the late 1990s. When sovereign states are unable or are unwilling to protect their own citizens, Responsibility to Protect, or R2P, states that the international community has the responsibility to step in. However, R2P, a moral principle dealing with the sovereignty of individual countries and their duty to protect the lives of their residents, is a complex, multi-layered policy that might well be up to today's graduates to resolve, speakers said. "I think that's the trick pony in R2P - a challenge to sovereignty per se," said Axworthy, who is credited with helping to develop the R2P concept. "Sovereignty is earned by protecting its citizens. And if it doesn't protect its citizens - or itself becomes the predator - then its right to sovereign protection is problematic.