Category: Peace and Conflict

The Responsibility to Protect

December 1, 2019

REVISITING HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION

The international community in the last decade repeatedly made a mess of handling the many demands that were made for “humanitarian intervention”: coercive action against a state to protect people within its borders from suffering grave harm. There were no agreed rules for handling cases such as Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo at the start of the 1990s, and there remain none today. Disagreement continues about whether there is a right of intervention, how and when it should be exercised, and under whose authority.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2002-11-01/responsibility-protect

Myanmar Genocide Lawsuit Is Filed at United Nations Court

November 11, 2019

Gambia, on behalf of Rohingya Muslims, opens an international dispute with Myanmar in an effort to have the country’s leadership tried for genocide.

The court’s 15 judges rarely deal with genocide. Based in the stately Peace Palace in The Hague, the Court of Justice was set up by the United Nations to rule on disputes between nations. It acts more like a court of appeal, focusing on questions of international law, such as disputes over borders or disagreements over international conventions.

The Long Kurdish Struggle

October 23, 2019

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s war is an ethnonationalist attack on Kurds and their aspirations.

Mr. Erdogan’s war is an ethnonationalist attack on Kurdish people and their aspirations, and an attempt at using Turkish military might to engineer demographic changes on land that belongs to more than one nation.

3 Million People With Nowhere to Go

September 10, 2018

President Bashar al-Assad’s forces are about to attack Idlib, the last rebel-held province in Syria. Fear of mass slaughter is increasing.

Syria taught me that knowledge does not lead to accountability. The families who were buried under the rubble will not get justice. Those who had to start over in foreign lands and were vilified for having the temerity to want to raise their children in safety won’t either. Neither will those who drowned on the way to European shores, nor will those who were besieged and starved to within an inch of their life get justice.