A right to humanitarian intervention?

This article analyses the Security Council’s external ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) populations from grave crimes in international law, such as genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing, and the international legal rules applicable with respect to military protection authorised under Chapter VII.

It focuses in particular on the prevention of the crime of genocide through humanitarian intervention and on the extent to which the emerging norm on R2P finds support for such preventive and protective action in international law.