This chapter explores how the experiences of human rights practitioners in Mexico, as described in Chap. 6 , and the notion of an overall protection failure of the state, can be drawn on to think critically about the protective capacity of International Human Rights Law (IHRL) in relation to disappearances committed by organised criminal groups. The dimensions of the state’s protection failure that are of particular relevance for the analysis, based on participants’ views on the responsibility of the state, are: the all-encompassing nature of the protection failure; its blatancy and ‘slipperiness’, which includes the question of intentionality; and the meta-uncertainty surrounding disappearance as a result of the state’s protection failure. Building on these dimensions, the chapter uses analytic perspectives from human rights compliance, sociological and legal scholarship to reflect on IHRL’s protective capacity based on the Mexican context. From the perspective of human rights compliance scholarship and the concept of ‘areas of limited statehood’, the difficulty of separating state and criminal actors in the Mexican context, as well as the apparent intentionality behind the state’s failure to protect, indicate a need for further research on the notion of willingness. From the perspective of socio-legal scholarship and Stanley Cohen’s concept of interpretive denial, the Mexican context highlights the limits and potential ‘trap’ of over-legalisation. Finally, returning to IHRL, a potential ‘intentionality’ behind an apparent lack of capacity to protect human rights is not considered in the ‘objective’ determination of state responsibility, thereby leaving a gap that might be addressed by revisiting the concept of ‘state criminality’ in international law and developing new concepts, such as ‘state gross negligence’ or ‘state recklessness’.