Academic

Ford on Failure to Respond to Natural Disaster

By Lawrence Solum

Stuart Ford (The John Marshall Law School) has posted Is the Failure to Respond Appropriately to a Natural Disaster a Crime Against Humanity? The Responsibility to Protect and Individual Criminal Responsibility in the Aftermath of Cyclone Nargis on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

On 2 and 3 May 2008, Cyclone Nargis struck Myanmar, devastating large portions of the Irawaddy Delta and creating the potential for a massive humanitarian crisis. Yet, the government of Myanmar rejected aid from some countries, limited the amount of aid entering the country to a fraction of what was needed and strictly controlled how that aid was distributed. The United Nations and many governments criticized Myanmar?s response to the cyclone as inadequate and inhumane, and senior politicians from a number of countries discussed whether the situation justified invoking the ?responsibility to protect.?

This paper explores several questions, including: 1) should the responsibility to protect have been invoked?; and 2) what would countries have been obligated to do if it was invoked? In particular, assuming that the invocation of the responsibility to protect would have been based on a finding that crimes against humanity were being committed by the government of Myanmar, would the international community be obligated to investigate and potentially prosecute the underlying violations of international criminal law?

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on July 28, 2009 (boomark / email).