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The Global Citizen: responsibility to protect
It was not unexpected, but the news was still dispiriting and depressing. Yesterday, the United Nation's Secretary General's top lawyer effectively put the brakes on a resolution which would have, among other things, urged the five permanent members of the Security Council (known as the P-5) to refrain from using their veto power to prevent U.N. action in situations where genocide or mass atrocities are threatening civilian lives.
Lloyd Axworthy, the former Foreign Minister of Canada and twice elected President of the U.N. Security Council, gave a presentation on the Responsibility to Protect at the University of Minnesota Law School last Tuesday in an event co-sponosred by the Minnesota chapter of Citizens for Global Solutions.
Click here to watch the webcast.
Citizens for Global Solutions CEO Don Kraus presented remarks yesterday at American University's Washington College of Law for a discussion on "Responsibility to Protect and the Arab Spring"
Kraus disagreed with critics who think that the international response in Libya has hurt the Responsibility to Protect concept. On the contrary, he believed that Libya solidified the principle as a norm in international affairs.
He also noted that the global response to Libya was made at "lightening speed", taking a matter of weeks compared to recent other humanitarian disasters, such as the conflict in the Congo, which took three years for the international community to respond.
Click here to hear his remarks in full.
Click here to watch the podcast live.
Citizens for Global Solutions CEO Don Kraus will be participating in a panel discussion at American University's Washington Law College on "The Responsiblity to Protect and the Arab Spring."
The presentation will be held on Tuesday, November 15th 2011 from 12:00-1:30 EST.
A guest blog post by Joe Schwartzberg:
The following op-ed is largely inspired two provocative and highly recommended essays. One, "Will Obama Denounce MLK as Memorial [Is] Dedicated?" by David Swanson, is excerpted and modified from his book, War Is a Lie (http://www.warisalie.org) and was transmitted to me by CGS Board member Dick Bernard. The other, "To the Shores of Tripoli," by a left wing, generally dovish Israeli journalist, Uri Avnery, was sent by John Sutter, a long-time President of the San Francisco-based Democratic World Federalists.
Early in his essay, cited above, Swanson quotes the following remarkable passage from President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech.
In his article Why attack Libya and not Syria?, CNN's Alan Silverleib lays out the many political reasons the United States and international community intervened in Libya but refrained from intervention in Syria, including:
Is there a Responsibility to Protect the people of Kyrgyzstan? The answer is Yes.
Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) calls upon the international community to abide by its moral responsibility to not let deadly conflicts got unnoticed. If R2P is important to you, then click HERE to see how Citizens for Global Solutions is working collectively with other organizations to urge the UN Security Council to remember their Responsibility to Protect. The ethnic violence and suffering that is taking place in Kyrgyzstan must end soon and the interim government of Kyrgyzstan has already stated that they are unable to protect their people from further violence. The people of Kyrgyzstan need the UN Security Council to not let the current conflict in their State go unnoticed.
Led by the recently formed International NGO Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect of which Citizens for Global Solutions is a part, efforts are underway at the United Nations to introduce a new legal mechanism to help prevent crimes against humanity.
The United Nations General Assembly's debate on the Responsibility to Protect [R2P], held on July 23, showed conflicting beliefs about the role of nations intervening in cases of genocide, war crimes, and mass atrocities.
On Thursday, July 23, the United Nations General Assembly gathered to debate the responsibility to protect, or R2P, which states that nations have an obligation to protect citizens from mass atrocities if their own government is unable or unwilling to do so. Although R2P was unanimously supported at the 2005 World Summit and the Security Council affirmed their agreement with R2P in 2006 by signing U.N.
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