Sovereignty as responsibility and the Ban Treaty 1

A US letter to Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) states parties described signatories as having made “a strategic error.” However, the letter recognised “the sovereign right” of Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) states parties to accede to the TPNW. To be correct, it is also their sovereign responsibility. To grasp the argument for the TPNW as an expression of sovereign responsibility by NPT states parties, it’s helpful to refer to the reconceptualisation of sovereignty as responsibility in the context of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle, formulated and adopted unanimously at the World Summit in 2005, as a replacement for the widely criticised new norm of “humanitarian intervention.”