Simon Poitrimolt
Last Wednesday, a panel discussion on the topic of genocide prevention, with a focus on mobilising international intervention, took place at McGill in Chancellor Day Hall. The event was hosted by the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Museum, McGill’s Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism (CHRLP), and the International Justice portfolio of the Faculty of Law’s Human Rights Working Group. The featured speakers were Kyle Matthews from ‘The Will to Intervene Project’ at the Montreal Institute for Genocide; Rebecca Hamilton, the author of Fighting for Darfur – Public Action and Struggle to Stop Genocide; and Professor Payam Akhavan of the faculty of law, who acted as moderator.
Louis-Philippe Jannard, the Human Rights co-ordinator of the Montreal Holocaust Museum was the one to originally approach the CHRLP with the idea of organising a panel. Jannard explained that the topic of genocide prevention is relevant today because of a need for international assertiveness on the issue.
“Although many genocides have happened in the last century, and although the international community adopted various tools and institutions since World War II to prevent such gross human rights violations, countries around the world remain very hesitant to intervene to put an end to tragedies that are still occurring today,” he said.
The discussion began by evaluating the lessons learned from the Holocaust to frame the historical context and provide a starting point for discussion of how the world has progressed in its treatment of the issue.
“Some crimes so shocked the conscience of mankind, that we don’t ask who the victims are, we don’t ask if we belong to the victim group and therefore have a stake in rescuing them,” Akhavan said. “We simply ask whether it is a part of human conscience and decency that we cannot remain indifferent. This is in the core of the notion of crimes against humanity … and this is the true universal lesson of the holocaust. But while we [said] never again in 1945 … [today] the vow of never again has become ever again.”
Citing examples like the genocide in Darfur as examples of more recent genocides that collectively resulted in the slaughter of tens of millions of civilians, the panel broke down the course of intervention mobilisation at both the international and grassroots level.
“Decision-making of international affairs doesn’t necessarily take place at the UN, they actually take place in national capitals,” Matthews said. “To mobilise international political will or intervention is to first mobilise domestic will … countries and national governments have done very little ever since we signed the genocide convention in 1948. We tend to let things fall apart, respond as the events are turning, and don’t say why we’re acting too late. That is not a sustainable way to help our planet.”
Aware of the growing capacity for citizen engagement in interventions, the speakers explored possible solutions for situations where the interests of a country’s elite circle of executors do not align with the majority.
“It’s incredibly easy to get people to care about people who they will never meet,” Hamilton said. “They can hold their elective representatives accountable, and they can do it through relatively straight-forward mechanisms. One thing that was done in the Darfur case was to introduce scorecards, grading every member of congress on how they responded to Darfur … what’s amazing was how quickly it was effective. Within one or two days of introducing scorecards you had not just staffers but senators themselves calling into offices … [asking what they could] do to get a better grade.”
Members of the audience appreciated the varied insights on mobilising genocide intervention.
“I particularly enjoyed the … point of view of the mobilisers,” Louise Lavigne, a U2 law student, said. “I’ve never really heard the perspective of someone who is involved in getting people to notice the issues of genocide from the bottom-up … I appreciated that element.”
