Good Essay About Reading Responses

JT
It’s true that human rights violations persist in spite of stringent legal safeguards. However, extension of the IHRL beyond the state risks placing the responsibility on a number of parties that cannot be pinned down, and therefore making enforcement impossible. It helps to note that the problem has never been the lack of technical legal protections for human rights; rather, the practical difficulties of enforcing such protections. Legal mechanisms such as the R2P for instance, have been ineffective, in part because countries pursuing their own interests (and loss of appetite by countries such as the US to intervene abroad), but also because of the difficulty of legal red tapes such as necessity and proportionality standards.
OK
The expectation of the rule of law and effective monitoring (because of the challenges such as insecurity) in active conflict is flawed, and so is any attempt to base protections on the same (Lubell, 2005; Janssen, 2008). In many cases, conflicts result in the break down of rule of law and government functions, and in a minority of cases such as Sudan and Bosnia, governments are active perpetrators of human rights violations. Even most importantly, government actors in weak states such as Rwanda, Syria, Burundi, and Sudan, use sovereignty as a legal and political deterrent to insulate themselves from external intervention, thereby facilitating violations. Similarly, awareness creation is only helpful if citizens can actually assert their rights.
EP
Strong international institutions such as the UN and the International Criminal Court, are critical as a deterrent, but the efficacy of these institutions is limited by evidence gathering barriers and the fact that they usually act in peace times. Some, such as the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, take too long, while others are heavily limited by the risk of triggering instability. The post 1945 international order, was driven largely by the experience of Nazi Germany’s sudden rise/threat, hence the bureacratic difficulty in international intervention. The UN Security Council, permanent membership, conflicting national interests (e.g. China-USA in Sudan), and the uncertainty that characterizes many violations, means that these institututions are ultimately impotent.

References

United Nations. (2011). INTERNATIONAL LEGAL PROTECTION OF HUMAN R i GHTS i N ARMED CONFLICT. Geneva: UN.
Cronin, B. (2007). The tension between sovereignty and intervention in the prevention of genocide. Human Rights Review , 8 (4), 293-305.
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. (2015). About the ICTY. Retrieved Jan 4, 2016, from http://www.icty.org/
Janssen, D. (2008). Humanitarian intervention and the prevention of genocide. Journal of Genocide Research , 10 (1), 289-306.
Lubell, N. (2005). Challenges in applying human rights law to armed conflict. 87 (860).