Responsibility To Protect (R2p) At 20: The Failure To Protect The Rohingyas
- DOI
- 10.2991/978-94-6239-785-9_53How to use a DOI?
- Keywords
- ASEAN; Myanmar; R2P; Responsibility to Protect; Rohingya Crisis
- Abstract
2025 marks the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) norm’s 20th anniversary since its official inception at the 2005 World Summit. R2P is an international norm that recognises the internal and external responsibility of States to protect the population from the four atrocity crimes i.e. genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. If a State ‘manifestly fails’ its primary responsibility to protect its population, then, the international community is prepared to take collective action in a timely and decisive manner to address such atrocity. Regardless of the said aspiration, this norm has failed to drive the intended response towards atrocity crises including the ongoing Rohingya crisis. The Rohingya people in Myanmar have faced systematic persecution for years and the humanitarian crisis that peaked in 2017 continues unabated as acknowledged in the United Nations Secretary-General’s 2025 R2P report. Hence, the objective of this paper is to study the factors that contributed towards the failure of this norm in the context of this crisis at three different levels inclusive of domestic, international and regional level. In doing so, this paper utilises a doctrinal research method which analyses primary and secondary sources namely international legal and non-legal documents, domestic legislations and investigative reports. This paper will discuss the following points: the absence of domestic willingness and ability to protect the Rohingya’s, the structural limitation of R2P due to veto and hidden veto, the post-Libya effect, ASEAN’s conditional role and no R2P champion within the region. It is unfortunate that this paper concludes that the R2P norm would remain ineffective and keep failing to protect the Rohingya people unless drastic practical changes are taken. Therefore, it is hoped that this study would contribute to motivate and be useful for future works on the Rohingya crisis or the betterment of R2P norm’s implementation.
- Copyright
- © 2026 The Author(s)
- Open Access
- Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.
Cite this article
TY - CONF AU - Muhammad Aiman bin Zulkifli PY - 2026 DA - 2026/10/07 TI - Responsibility To Protect (R2p) At 20: The Failure To Protect The Rohingyas BT - Proceedings of the UUM 13th International Legal Conference 2025 (UUMILC 2025) PB - Atlantis Press SP - 758 EP - 773 SN - 2667-128X UR - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-785-9_53 DO - 10.2991/978-94-6239-785-9_53 ID - Zulkifli2026 ER -