This report explores opportunities and barriers that exist to broadening the scope of the Responsibility to protect doctrine to include cases of widespread and systematic abuse of economic, social and cultural rights (ESCR). It investigates the enabling role that standards of due diligence have played for the development of ESCR, both substantive and in terms of their justiciability, and examines the growing dissociation of Crimes against Humanity from the context of armed conflict. Building on an appreciation of the political and practical obstacles to an enlargement of the scrope of the R2P doctrine the report neverthless concludes that limiting a discussion of the R2P to situations of armed conflict is inconsistent with the wider trends in international law that form the basis of the doctrine. The report recognises however that any decisions especially concerning the use of force under the doctrine have to be made with high sensitivity to the context.

The Politics of Intervention parliamentary lecture series focused on issues of international human rights accountability and the responsibility to protect in the context of changing views on state sovereignty. Speakers included Luis Moreno Ocampo, Romeo Dallaire and Mukesh Kapila, John Kampfner and Robert Cooper, and Dan Smith.