Abstract:

The responsibility to protect (RtoP) which was put forward by the ‘International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty’ (ICISS) in 2001, determined serious violations of human rights such as genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity as a ‘just cause threshold’ for the military intervention for human protection purposes. From the beginning of the conflicts in 2011 to present day, Syrian case has evolved into a huge humanitarian crisis in which serious human rights violations have occurred. In this context, despite the humanitarian crisis went far beyond situations which set ‘threshold’ for the RtoP why any humanitarian military intervention is not accomplished has triggered serious debates. The explanations considering why there is not an intervention has been put forward within the framework of the conditions peculiar to the Syrian case, dynamics of the international politics which do not allow to any military intervention and the possibility of a ‘more harm than good’ as a result of an intervention. In this study, it is argued that the RtoP doctrine built within the framework of the humanitarian protection mission offers tools that provide legitimate grounds for the non-intervention situations. This dilemma which is conceptualized as ‘humanitarian non-intervention’ in this study is discussed within the context of the efficacy of RtoP doctrine

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