The Responsibility to Protect and the Duty to Prevent Genocide: Lessons to Be Learned from the Role of the International Community and the Media during the Rwandan Genocide and the Conflict in the Former Yugoslavia

I. INTRODUCTION Never (3) became the catchphrase in the years following the Holocaust. (4) After the Nazis exterminated at least twelve million people, six million of whom were Jews, the world awoke to the horror of genocide and vowed to never again let a of such magnitude take place. (5) To prevent genocide, the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948. (6) Convention deals with issues related to the crime of (7) Convention codifies the prohibition against genocide (8) although it has been outlawed for much longer in customary international law and has occurred throughout history. (9) definition of genocide is, however, intensely contested terrain. (10) The term and its underlying concepts have been subject to a bewildering array of misrepresentations and distortions, both unintentional and deliberate. (11) One reason for the disagreement about the extent to which genocide occurred in the past is that international legal genocide convictions occurred for the first time only in the 1990s. (12) Prior to the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and that for the former Yugoslavia, there were no courts to prosecute those guilty of committing genocide internationally. Few countries had this on their statute books, although some prosecuted individuals were charged with murder and other types of domestic crimes. Thus, while genocide was deemed to be the most terrible of crimes, the fact that there was no forum to prosecute those guilty of it resulted in genocide being seen by some as a that existed in theory rather than practice. In brief, the lack of court decisions on genocide resulted in a lack of clarity regarding its interpretation and practical application in specific settings. (13) Despite the adoption of the Convention sixty years ago, nearly fifty genocides (14) have occurred in places (15) including the Ukraine, Burundi, Paraguay, Cambodia, (16) Iraq, Rwanda, (17) and continue to occur today in the Darfur region of Sudan. (18) In this regard, a major failure of the Convention has been the absence of an institution to oversee the work of preventing genocide from occurring and intervening where genocide was taking place. (19) Moreover, despite adopting the Convention, the global community has done little to prevent these atrocities and many millions of people continue to be killed in genocidal acts. Until recently, the international community has frequently failed to respond appropriately to incidents of genocide and other significant human rights violations. While historically principles of non-intervention and sovereignty have been thought to preclude the action of one state within another, these concepts are yielding to two doctrines: humanitarian intervention (20) and the to protect. (21) While the principle of state sovereignty has not been discarded, it has seemingly been eroded by the development of such doctrines as the responsibility to protect, which is believed to have arrived formally from then U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's 1999 charge that the world must formulate a response to gross human rights violations. (22) This was partly a response to the criticism raised as result of the world's inaction when the Rwandan genocide occurred. responsibility to protect, however, also finds its roots in the 1948 Genocide Convention that obligates states to protect possible genocide victims and to punish genocidal perpetrators. Media coverage of disasters and gross human rights violations, (23) in particular, is not a new phenomenon. (24) For example, images depicting emaciated concentration camp survivors were published in the wake of the Holocaust and international newspapers covered the events of the Armenian genocide of 1914. (25) media has played an increasingly important role in determining which topics and events the public is made aware. …