Many people in the United States are fond of saying that this country has the best healthcare in the world. It is not necessarily the “best in the world” (Docteur and Berenson 2009). Socialized medicine system and universal healthcare are the health care options available to citizens in developed countries outside the United States. Under a socialized medicine system, the government owns and runs the system. It employs the doctors, nurses, and other staff, and it owns and runs the hospitals (Klein 2009). The best example of socialized medicine is in Great Britain, where the National Health System (NHS) gives free healthcare to all its residents. Germany, Singapore, and Canada all have universal healthcare. People often look to Canada`s universal healthcare system, Medicare, as a model for the system. In Canada, healthcare is publicly funded and is administered by the separate provincial and territorial governments.
failing in those actions as a perpetrator or is simply unable to counteract mass atrocities, then the responsibility falls upon the international community to take action.(Ibid) The report also alludes to the fact that whilst methods of conflict resolution should be employed, the possibility of military action whilst seen as an ‘exceptional measure’, it was in no way discounted. A final important concept of the ICISS’s report was to extend humanitarian intervention further than military action, incorporating a responsibility to prevent, react and rebuild, concepts which are described as ‘emerging guiding principles’ by the report itself. (Ibid) Between 2001 and 2005, R2P was both endorsed and referred to as an ‘emerging norm’ by many including Kofi Annan within a report entitled, Larger Freedom: Towards Development, Security and Human Rights for All. (Donald and Michael 2014, p10) The UN world summit held in September 2005, became a seminal event for the emergence of R2P however, as it was incorporated into the summit outcome document. Furthermore, its adoption was ratified by each UN member enforcing the concept of R2P as an ‘emerging norm’ within the global sphere not solely an empty political principle. The 2009 General Assembly debate surrounding a report written by UN Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon on its implementation globally has spread the culture of R2P further. Whilst within the debate, as Hehir argues, there was “little clarification of the criteria for intervention”, the fact that the report does not retract from any of the principles adopted in 2005, and outlined within the introduction, but constructively builds upon them, shows a level of global recognition for the importance of the R2P doctrine.(Hehir 2012, p54), (Badescu 2010, p8) It is clear, therefore, that R2P emerged from UN mistakes and frail international law surrounding humanitarian intervention, its subsequent conceptual development and its recognition by the international community has seen it evolve from an emerging political policy to a predominant international norm.
Having established both why and how R2P emerged to become an internationally accepted norm, the assessment of how it has affected African conflict over the 21st-century, merits analytical focus. It must be said that each of the case studies that will be discussed are dramatically different situations, this makes the application of Responsibility to Protect different in each case and thus the dimension and nature of how intervention is applied must be viewed through this perspective of situational difference.
Arguably the most prominent case in which Responsibility to Protect can be seen to have been enacted upon in the 21st-century is that of the 2011 Libyan civil conflict. Over the period February 2011-12, 21,490 Libyans were killed at a rate of 5.1 per 1000 people per year, a further 19,700 were injured and 435,000 were displaced. (Daw, Dau and El-Buzedi 2015, pp101-107) The extent to which this can be considered a mass atrocity can be measured by the UN’s response. This UN response came rapidly on the 26th of February 2011, just three days after the conflict began, as the UN Security Council unanimously adopted resolution 1970. The resolution expressed a “grave concer
