The Responsibility to Protect—and Catholic Legal Theory

When His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI spoke at the United Nations on April 18, he addressed the duty and responsibility to protect peoples—not only from gross violations of human rights but also in situations of humanitarian crises, human or natural. It strikes me that the current situation in Myanmar/Burma may provide a situation in which a difficult and uncooperative government is augmenting the dreadful suffering of the Burmese people who are experiencing the many tragedies of Cyclone Nargis. I am in the process of trying to develop some thoughts about what does Catholic legal theory have to say about the responsibility to protect. I begin with these words of Pope Benedict delivered during his UN address:

Recognition of the unity of the human family, and attention to the innate dignity of every man and woman, today find renewed emphasis in the principle of the responsibility to protect.  This has only recently been defined, but it was already present implicitly at the origins of the United Nations, and is now increasingly characteristic of its activity.  Every State has the primary duty to protect its own population from grave and sustained violations of human rights, as well as from the consequences of humanitarian crises, whether natural or man-made.  If States are unable to guarantee such protection, the international community must intervene with the juridical means provided in the United Nations Charter and in other international instruments.  The action of the international community and its institutions, provided that it respects the principles undergirding the international order, should never be interpreted as an unwarranted imposition or a limitation of sovereignty.

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