The Syrian crisis within the framework of the responsibility to protect

ABSTRACT 15 March 2019, marked the eighth anniversary of the Syrian crisis. During this eight years Syria and the international community faced: almost six million refugees, over six million internally displaced people, almost half a million causalities, enormous human rights violations, systematical executions in prisons and over two hundred chemical attacks. There has been a lot of attempts for solving this crises throughout political means, but unfortunately the solution still hasn't been found. The efforts for controlling war and human suffering are as old as human history but this effort gained a new dimension with the term Responsibility to Protect Report (RtoP) which appeared together with the report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) in 2001. After living through multiple humanitarian crises in the 1990s the commission decided to put human rights before sovereignty and to treat sovereignty rather as a responsibility not a privilege. The new notion called Responsibility to Protect gained bigger significance in 2005 with its acceptance by the UN Security Council. Despite the fact that the UN took responsibility on not allowing another Kosovo, Rwanda or Srebrenica, unfortunately they haven't been able to prevent or stop the Syrian crises which is at least as tragic as the ones in the past. This thesis is defending the fact that the Syrian crisis could have been solved with on time use of the RtoP mechanisms. In this framework the Syrian crises has been evaluated trough out the RtoP's six principles determined for making a decision on the use of military force in solving serious human rights violations. As a conclusion it is very clear that the occurrence and development of RtoP is very important. Nonetheless the Syrian crisis provided a great opportunity to create a global agreement on the necessity of RtoP to prevent new crises in the future, but this opportunity couldn't be utilized. Key words: human rights, RtoP, Syrian crisis, violation, UN, responsibility to protect