The R2P and Atrocity Prevention: Contesting Human Rights as a Threat to International Peace and Security

The significant link between human rights violations and the eventual outbreak of atrocity crimes has been widely promoted across the United Nations system. However, the question of how the connection between the responsibility to protect (R2P) norm and human rights plays out in the actual practices and debates of the UN Security Council has been relatively under explored.
SAMUEL JARVIS builds on constructivist research into norm robustness in order to trace how the R2P’s shift to an atrocity prevention focus has generated increased applicatory contestation over the push to expand the link between human rights and threats to international peace and security. 
Based on extensive analysis of UN Security Council meeting records and three case studies, the article – titled ‘The R2P and atrocity prevention: Contesting human rights as a threat to international peace and security’ and published in the European Journal of International Security – highlights two competing ideological frames that currently divide the Security Council’s approach to atrocity prevention.
This division has emphasized a key disconnect between the work of the Security Council and other UN institutions such as the Human Rights Council, therefore severely limiting the potential for effective atrocity prevention responses. 
Thus, without a stronger connection to human rights in the process of threat identification, the R2P norm will remain considerably limited as a prevention tool. 
Consequently, the article also contributes to a new understanding of the critical role evolving institutional rules and practices play in state attempts to both constrain and reshape human protection norms.

When May United Nations Peacekeepers Use Lethal Force to Protect Civilians?

Reconciling Threats to Civilians, Imminence, and the Right to Life

While the use of force in UN peacekeeping was traditionally limited to self-defense, the UN Security Council now regularly deploys peacekeeping missions with robust mandates to protect civilians and encourages their proactive implementation, including by using force. 
For many years, the Security Council authorized the use of ‘all necessary means’ to protect civilians from ‘imminent threats’ of physical violence, but its recent mandates have often dropped references to ‘imminence’. The UN has also interpreted such mandates as broader authorization for peacekeepers to use force in response to temporally ill-defined threats to civilians. 
This turn to robust civilian protection is often celebrated, yet the legal parameters of using force continue to evolve below the radar and are rarely scrutinized, with scholarly writing focused on peacekeeper self-defense, rules of engagement and UN policy to justify proactive mandate implementation. 
Drawing on an analysis of the relationship between peacekeeping mandates and international law in light of the shift from defensive to proactive peacekeeping, HANNA BOURGEOIS and  PATRYK I. LABUDA argue that the legality of using force for civilian protection purposes must be reconciled not only with Security Council resolutions and their language on imminence, but also with human rights law (HRL), which imposes strict temporal conditions for lawful deprivations of the right to life outside the conduct of hostilities. 
Using examples of how the UN’s current practice of using force to protect civilians in hostile environments may contravene international norms, their article – titled ‘When May UN Peacekeepers Use Lethal Force to Protect Civilians? Reconciling Threats to Civilians, Imminence, and the Right to Life’ and published in the Journal of Conflict & Security Law – attempts to reconcile proactive civilian-oriented peacekeeping with the concept of imminence as understood in HRL.

Hanna Bourgeois, Patryk I Labuda, When May UN Peacekeepers Use Lethal Force to Protect Civilians? Reconciling Threats to Civilians, Imminence, and the Right to Life, Journal of Conflict and Security Law, 2022; krac027, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcsl/krac027