Terrorism and War

A makeshift primary school for students at the UNMISS displaced persons camp in Bor, Jonglei state, South Sudan. Photo: UNMISS/Mihad Abdalla

english.alarabiya.net - by staff writer - April 18, 2014

At least 58 people were killed and more than 100 others wounded in Thursday's attack on a UN base in South Sudan sheltering thousands of displaced civilians, a U.N. official said Friday.

“Forty-eight bodies, including children, women, men, have been recovered from inside the base. The bodies of 10 attackers have been found outside the base.

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UN News Centre - News Focus: Sudan and South Sudan

BBC - South Sudan conflict: Attack on UN base 'kills dozens'

CNN - 48 killed in attack on peacekeepers' base in South Sudan, U.N. says

Turkey shoots down Syrian plane

reuters.com - by Daren Butler - March 23, 2014

(Reuters) - Turkish armed forces shot down a Syrian plane on Sunday that Ankara said had crossed into its air space in an area where Syrian rebels have been battling President Bashar al-Assad's forces for control of a border crossing.

"A Syrian plane violated our airspace," Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan told an election rally in northwest Turkey. "Our F-16s took off and hit this plane.

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nejm.org - Jennifer Leaning, M.D., and Debarati Guha-Sapir, Ph.D.
N Engl J Med 2013; 369:1836-1842 - November 7, 2013 - DOI: 10.1056/NEJMra1109877

Natural disasters and armed conflict have marked human existence throughout history and have always caused peaks in mortality and morbidity. But in recent times, the scale and scope of these events have increased markedly. Since 1990, natural disasters have affected about 217 million people every year, and about 300 million people now live amidst violent insecurity around the world. The immediate and longer-term effects of these disruptions on large populations constitute humanitarian crises. In recent decades, public health interventions in the humanitarian response have made gains in the equity and quality of emergency assistance.

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un.org

Who is responsible for protecting people from gross violations of human rights?

Emergence of the concept

Debating the right to "humanitarian intervention" (1990s)

Following the tragedies in Rwanda and the Balkans in the 1990s, the international community began to seriously debate how to react effectively when citizens’ human rights are grossly and systematically violated. The question at the heart of the matter was whether States have unconditional sovereignty over their affairs or whether the international community has the right to intervene in a country for humanitarian purposes.

In his Millennium Report of 2000, then Secretary-General Kofi Annan, recalling the failures of the Security Council to act in a decisive manner in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, put forward a challenge to Member States: "If humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica, to gross and systematic violation of human rights that offend every precept of our common humanity?"