The Responsibility to Protect Libyans
The international community is poised to impose sanctions on Muammar Qaddafi's regime in response to the carnage it has unleashed against ordinary Libyans. But the "responsibility to protect," a principle that the UN General Assembly embraced unanimously in 2005, authorizes – if not requires – that military options be considered as well.
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ABU DHABI – Sovereignty is not a license to kill. No state can abdicate the responsibility to protect its own people from crimes against humanity, let alone justify perpetrating such crimes itself. When a state manifestly fails in that protection, it is the wider international community’s responsibility to provide it by taking “collective, timely, and decisive” action through the Security Council under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter.