Peacekeeping and Human Rights Protection

Abstract

The post-Cold War world has witnessed devastative armed conflicts replete with systematic violence and egregious human rights violations against civilians. Civilians today are the vast majority of casualties in armed conflicts and are increasingly targeted by combatants. Acts of violence against them, especially vulnerable women, children, and the elderly, include systematic killings, planned ethnic cleansing, mass rapes, starvation, disappearances, amputation of limbs, and torture. The nature and effects of human rights violations committed in civil conflicts remain disturbing and the United Nations, particularly the UN peacekeeping missions deployed in violent civil wars, has increasingly been expected to prevent and/or halt such crimes. Past UN missions designed to fulfill traditional peacekeeping roles in interstate wars were woefully underequipped, and both politically and operationally unprepared to take on the very challenging tasks of protecting vulnerable civilians in the changed post-Cold War violent civil conflict environment. The United Nations’ traumatic experiences in the 1990s, when it failed to protect civilians from genocide in Rwanda, crimes against humanity in the former Yugoslavia, and in Darfur and the Democratic Republic of Congo, necessitated a reassessment of the fundamental principles and capabilities of UN peacekeeping operations. These failures demonstrate the urgent need for reforms in United Nations’ peace operational paradigm to enable UN peacekeepers to play a much more active role in the protection of civilians when deployed in violent civil conflicts. Expectations of UN peacekeeping operations have steadily heightened in recent times, leading to the framing and adoption of UN Charter Chapter VII robust mandates, which routinely include authorization for peacekeepers to take measures to protect civilians under imminent threat of violence.