ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the UN Security Council’s relationship with the responsibility to protect. After an overview of the application of the doctrine in Council resolutions and presidential statements, the chapter analyses the Council’s actions in Libya and Syria as contrasting examples of situations in which it authorised and did not authorise the use of force. A significant part of the debate surrounding the responsibility to protect deals with the use of the veto power by the five permanent members of the Security Council, which in certain cases would jeopardise the protection of populations from mass violence. Accordingly, this chapter presents various initiatives aimed at overcoming the deadlock between Council members should a stalemate jeopardise actions to stop or prevent mass violence, from the Uniting for Peace resolution to the Brazilian proposal of ‘responsibility while protecting’.
