Rights and justice

This article was originally published in French in Slate Magazine on 4 December 2015, accessible here. The article was translated into English by Teresa Piacentini for the University of Glasgow GramNet blog.

This post was published as a reaction to the attack on the MSF hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, that took place on October 3rd, 2015.

On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the ICRC (1863-2013) and in light of the recently launched issue of the Review on "The future of humanitarian action", the Harvard Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research (HPCR) and the International Review of the Red Cross are pleased to co-host a Live Web Seminar on the topic: "Perspectives on the Future of Humanitarian Action"...

On 4th August 2006, 17 Sri Lankans working for Action Contre la Faim were executed inside their own compound, the same day Sri Lankan government forces reclaimed control of the town of Muttur.

Considering that the United Nations juridictions officially recognises six genocides, Rony Brauman considers unjustifiable the fact that the French Parliament only recognises . The only alternative is to recognise all of them or none.

Two operational situations have recently caused Médecins Sans Frontières to confront the question of torture and the instrumentalisation of medicine by those who practise it.

Could a doctor working for a humanitarian organisation be sentenced to life imprisonment in the United States for having offered his “expert advice” to people linked to a “terrorist organisation”? That is what is feared by a number of civil rights’ organisations in the US since the Supreme Court declared on 21 June that the legislation known as the Material Support Statute was constitutional. 

The United Nations has again raised the question of the implication of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) - in power in Rwanda since July 1994 - in crimes committed between 1993 and 2003 in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Rony Brauman criticises the International Criminal Court's indictment of the Sudanese president for genocide. If the prosecutor's argument is followed, humanitarian organisations working in the displaced people's camps should be charged with complicity in genocide.

Argued in the 1990s in the name of the "right or duty to intervene", the application of military might to rescue populations in danger is now debated with reference to the "Responsibility to Protect" paradigm (or "R2P" for those in the know). In this article Fabrice Weissman explains why MSF refuses to adhere to this doctrine of ‘just war', whose legalisation would effectively be legalising a new form of imperialism.

The debate over humanitarian intervention is keeping the northeastern US's left wing intelligentsia in a continual stir, torn between its opposition to imperialism and its devotion to human rights.

On March 3, NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen sent a direct appeal to the humanitarian community. Acknowledging the limits of military force in the stabilization and reconstruction effort in Afghanistan, he wants to create a closer partnership with the NGOs.