The aim of the policy seminar was to interrogate issues around humanitarian intervention in Africa and the responsibility of regional governments and the international community in the face of humanitarian crises. The “responsibility to protect” is the legal and ethical commitment by the international community acting through organisations such as the UN to protect citizens from genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity and/or ethnic cleansing. The meeting reviewed and analysed the experiences and lessons from recent conflicts in Africa, and assessed the degree to which the “responsibility to protect” citizens has been adhered to. A key concern of the...

Nonetheless, the international community has also adopted a series of international legal instruments to protect human rights in the 60 years since the UN’s foundation. The primacy of the principle of state sovereignty however rendered these instruments largely ineffective in practice. Even the existence of the 1948 Genocide Convention, under which the principle of non-intervention can be overridden, could not prevent the 1994 Rwandan genocide. While the avoidance of the use of force was standard practice for UN operations throughout the Cold War – with the exception of abortive interventions such as the United Nations Operation in the Congo (ONUC)...

While some sceptics have voiced concern that military interventions may be used to promote the parochial goals of global or regional powers in situations where there is no real humanitarian crisis, the concept is closely aligned to the vision of the African Union’s Constitutive Act of 2000.

The AU clearly notes that military intervention should be the last resort, and that diplomatic, peaceful measures such as dialogue, are the best option in conflict situations. The Constitutive Act also embraces the three levels of action prescribed by the Canadian-sponsored ICISS report: prevention, intervention, and post-conflict reconstruction. The intention of the “responsibility...