The potential empowerment of the UN System as a result of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine requires an examination of what it could mean for both state sovereignty and the authority of the UN Security Council. I argue that the Security Council is already a sovereign body within the international system that would be greatly empowered by the implementation of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine and the veto reform efforts of the Accountability, Transparency and Coherence (ACT) Group. I rely on Carl Schmitt’s influential definition of sovereignty and his key takeaways regarding the 1919 German constitution to illustrate the existence of two distinct levels of Schmittian-like sovereigns in the international system: state sovereigns and representative sovereigns. I will then describe the authority and structure of the Security Council followed by a brief case study of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) intervention in Kosovo as an example of how real-life situations challenge the Security Council’s ability to exercise its role as a representative sovereign, including a discussion about how it can either fail to act or choose not to act and the difference between them. Afterwards, I will discuss the Responsibility to Protect doctrine and how it expands the relative power of representative sovereignty at the cost of reducing the relative power of state sovereignty, culminating in a discussion of what attempts to reform the veto power on the Security Council may do to the Council’s sovereignty. Finally, I will conclude with a discussion of the key takeaways of this paper and some further considerations.

In response to the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides of the 1990’s, the United Nations created the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine as part of its 2005 World Summit Outcome document. The goal of R2P is to promote the idea that the international community should act to protect populations from mass atrocity crimes (genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and ethnic cleansing) in the case a State fails to meet their responsibility. This report seeks to examine the Responsibility to Protect principle and see how its concepts are perceived and implemented in the private sector, given the sector’s significant influence in the world today. Using R2P as a frame of reference, I explored the concept that private sector organizations, through their actions and operations, have a responsibility to not profit from or enable systems that perpetuate mass atrocity crimes against populations. This was done through an analysis of private sector firms, regulatory frameworks, industry norms, organization initiatives, and perspectives of actors engaging with the subject matter, in addition to a modern case study regarding the experience of Uighurs and Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang, China. The scope of this project was focused on select American companies that are multinational publicly traded companies with a market capitalization of over $200 billion. This report is meant to serve as a guide for into the concepts of R2P in the private sector and provides access to resources for further exploration.