The Responsibility to Protect

In The Responsibility to Protect: The Promise of Stopping Mass Atrocities in Our Time, Jared Genser and Irwin Cotler provide a comprehensive overview on how this contemporary principle of international law has developed and analyze how best to apply it to current and future humanitarian crises. The "responsibility to protect" is a doctrine unanimously adopted by the UN World Summit in 2005, which says that all states have an obligation to protect their own citizens from mass atrocities, which includes genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing. Its adoption and application has generated a passionate debate in law schools, professional organizations, media and within the U.N. system.

To present a full picture of where the doctrine now stands and where it could go in the future, editors Jared Genser and Irwin Cotler have assembled a global team of authors with diverse backgrounds and differing viewpoints, including Edward Luck, the UN Secretary-General's Special Advisor on the Responsibility to Protect. Genser and Cotler balance the pro-RtoP chapters with more skeptical arguments from agency staff and scholars with long experience in addressing mass atrocities. Framed by a Preface from Desmond Tutu and Vaclav Havel and a Conclusion from Gareth Evans, these in-depth and authoritative analyses move beyond theory to demonstrate how RtoP has worked on the ground and should work if applied to other crises. The global focus of this book, as well as its detailed application of the principle in case studies make it uniquely useful to staff at international organizations and NGOs considering use of the principle in a given circumstance, to scholars providing advice to governments, and to students seeking guidance on this still-expanding subject.

Preface by Desmond Tutu and V?clav Havel

Jared Genser is Managing Director of Perseus Strategies, a law firm whose practice focuses on international human rights. Independently, he is founder of Freedom Now, a non-profit organization that works to free prisoners of conscience worldwide. Previously, he was a partner in the government affairs practice of DLA Piper LLP and a management consultant with McKinsey & Company. He has taught semester-long seminars about the UN Security Council at the University of Michigan and University
of Pennsylvania law schools. He holds a B.S. from Cornell University, an M.P.P. from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and a J.D. cum laude from the University of Michigan Law School.

Irwin Cotler, PC, OC, MP has been a Canadian Member of Parliament since 1999 and served as Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada from 2003-2006. He is currently on leave as a Professor of Law at McGill University, where he is Director of its Human Rights Program and Chair of InterAmicus, the McGill-based international human rights advocacy center. Previously, he has been a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School and a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at Yale Law School. Mr. Cotler received a B.C.L. from McGill University and an LL.M. from Yale Law School.