About CCR2P

Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto

Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto


The Canadian Centre for the Responsibility to Protect (CCR2P)
 is a non-profit research organization which aims to promote scholarly engagement and political implementation of the principle. The Responsibility to Protect, also referred to as RtoP or R2P, is a newly emerging norm coined in 2001 and later adopted by 150 states at the 2005 World Summit, which maintains that when sovereign states are unable or unwilling to fulfill their responsibility to protect their own populations from genocide and other mass atrocities, the international community has the responsibility to do so. Based at the University of Toronto, the CCR2P has ten core mandates:

1) To conduct research on the normative, legal and policy dimensions of the R2P principle and any other pertinent concepts;
2) To trace the evolution of the Canadian government’s policies with regards to the R2P principle and advocate for timely implementation of R2P principle in Canadian foreign policy;
3) To serve as a hub for information, research and analyses on R2P through our online database;
4) To provide timely and multilingual data on a real-time basis online through the R2Plive.org project;
5) To collaborate with other research institutes and civil society groups working on R2P for national and regional prevention and response mechanisms;
6) To nurture the young minds (high school & undergrads) through R2P Education Kit and various outreach efforts on social media platforms such as Twitter & Youtube;
7) To create a national and global network of R2P scholars (Junior Fellows & Senior Fellows) and foster intellectual engagements of R2P in universities in Canada;
8) To communicate its R2P-related findings with the academic community, political actors, civil society groups and the general public on a regular basis (print and online media);
9) To provide a forum for public discussion and debates on R2P through educational workshops and annual symposium; and
10) To be ready to engage with, and to offer consultations to, governmental and inter-governmental agencies for strategically implementing R2P in the policy-making process.

By working closely with the Munk School for Global Affairs and the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto, the CCR2P will seek to develop networks with various academic institutes both within and outside of Canada. While R2P today still remains “a concept, not yet a policy” the founders of the CCR2P hope that rigorous research and policy recommendations from the Centre would be a step closer to the actual implementation of the R2P in the near future.