February 14, 2008 - Edmonton - U of A international relations expert Andy Knight will lead a new global centre aimed at improving the response to genocide and mass murder.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon announced the creation of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect in New York today, saying he hopes it will become "an effective advocate in the struggle to prevent the world's most heinous mass crimes."
The centre's mission is based on a Canadian-led initiative that would help the international community intervene when a government fails to protect its citizens from violence.
At an International Week forum earlier this month, Knight said the responsibility to protect (R2P) doctrine "displaces the traditional norm of non-intervention and sovereignty, which many state leaders have been using as a fig leaf to cover their atrocities committed against their own people."
Since 75 per cent of today's conflicts are intra-state, rather than inter-state, he said, it is more important than ever to provide the moral authority for intervention and the obligation to "name and shame those countries that refuse to respect this principle."
Based at the City University of New York, Knight will serve as executive director of the centre for two years under the auspices of the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), a think tank funded largely by the Canadian and Ontario governments to provide advice on multilateral governance issues.
The R2P centre will implement and promote the new call to action on behalf of populations at risk through research and high-level advocacy. Agreed to by heads of state from around the world in 2005, R2P seeks to "eradicate a legacy of inaction that has led to the loss of millions of lives during the Holocaust and in Cambodia, Rwanda, Srebrenica and Darfur."
The centre has already garnered the support of many human rights activists, including former UN General Secretary Kofi Annan, former president of Ireland Mary Robinson, president of the University of Winnipeg and former Canadian foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy, Canadian senator and former general Romeo Dellaire and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
Today's announcement is meant to coincide with the designation of February as R2P month, part of a year-long campaign celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.