The candidate of the Greens, Pekka Haavisto did considerably well at the Finnish presidential elections in early 2012. He received 18.8 % of the votes at the first round among eight candidates of eight different parties and made it with that result to the run-off round against Sauli Niinistö, the candidate of the right-wing conservative…
Month: April 2012
Responsibility To Protect: An Introduction
April 6, 1994. A plane carrying President Juvénal Habyarimana is shot down over the skies of Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, acting as a catalyst for the murder of around 800,000 people over just 100 days. These events should require little extrapolation here. Skip forward 7 years, past civil war in Sierra Leone, war in Congo, and…
When Intervention Becomes Necessary
In 1994 about 800 000 people were brutally killed in Rwanda during a period of just one hundred days. After this episode the UN officials, heads of state and civil society all agreed that we could never let this happen again. But it did. In 2003 a humanitarian emergency developed in Darfur in western Sudan…
Responsibility to Protect: The problem with neglecting its political dimension
Seeing children dying at the horn of Africa makes us feel guilty, seeing the piles of dead bodies in the streets of Kigali, the capital city of Rwanda as well makes us feel that we just bluntly have to do something against it. That we have the moral obligation to act and prevent this horror…