What barriers are there to the effective prevention of genocide and Essay - 1

What barriers are there to the effective prevention of genocide and crimes against humanity - Essay Example The human race continue to talk of the visible and the invisible mass killings, some of which have acquired explicit names, yet little action have come forth to secure sustainable world peace. Shortly after the turn of the new millennium, the Darfur mass murders accompanied by unimaginable destruction, mass rapes, and dislocation followed a familiar trend that has long demanded a concerted, prompt effort as the rest of the world watched the events of the other side of human nature unfold unabated. Sixty years after the United Nations’ Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG), and two solid decades after its ratification by the most powerful nation on earth, the United States, the world still lacks reliable institutional frameworks to confront the evil inherent in the subject matter at hand. The term ‘genocides’ has its origin in the work of Raphael Lemkin’s 1944 analysis of the Holocaust titled Axis Rule in Occupied Europ e; an enormous task that basically found the phrase ‘mass killing’ rather inadequate to fully capture the atrocities of the event (Kentis, 2011, p.3). Before Lemkin’s work, crimes of mass atrocities [â€Å"crimes of crimes†] lacked â€Å"explicit identity† (Power, 2002, p. 30). Scholars are in agreement that genocides are not natural disasters, but man-made occurrences that are preventable. (Fein, 2000, p. 42). Despite the inherent flaws with regards to the legal definition adopted at the above mentioned convention concerning what exactly constitutes genocide, its recognition as a crime of humanity, without a doubt, reinforced the legitimacy by the international community to act, on humanitarian grounds, to prevent and possibly stop the elements with ill intentions from actualizing any form of pre-planned atrocities. To date, the convention’s statutes largely remains monumental with genocide intervention, even with immense evidence of ethnic cleansing taking place, occurring at the final stages of Stanton’s eight stage model (Stanton, 2008). This paper briefly elaborates on some of the barriers towards effective prevention of world genocides and crimes against humanity; and where possible the analysis will include the flawed nature of the theo retical frameworks that seem to work only in paper, the blockade erected by the concept of ‘State sovereignty’, the difficulty of holding perpetrators to account, and the general lack of international will/interest to intervene in matters considered domestic. The Impediments to the Prevention of Crimes against Humanity The campaigns initiated by Lemkin to include and subsequently prohibit genocide under the international laws was more than a welcome call for international action as demonstrated by UN General Assembly’s nod on the 9th December 1948. To be sure, even though the word genocide may appear recent in origin, the concept is almost as old as mankind