• Approaches to conflict prevention

Approaches to conflict prevention

This report details a roundtable discussion involving UN Special Advisers to the Secretary-General, together with high-level African policymakers, academics, and practitioners from government, regional and sub regional organizations, the UN, and civil society. They met to dialogue and to elaborate the scope and meaning of Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) in an African context in relation to prevention of genocide.

The roundtable presented the following conclusions:

• a multilateral rules-based framework that defines the parameters of collective action would help to discourage the unilateral abuse of RtoP
  
• RtoP cannot be disconnected from the fundamental need for governance and judicial reform and that donors and international organizations should take significant steps to limit the domestic distortions created by international assistance
  
• the UN and regional organizations should clarify and elaborate the parameters of their relationship in the areas of capacity building, early warning, prevention, and enforcement. The UN and other international actors, as well, should ramp up efforts to improve the AU’s prevention and early-warning capacities
  
• Discussions also noted that, by emphasizing state responsibility and by highlighting the importance of prevention, capacity building, and early warning, RtoP is a more comprehensive and multifaceted mechanism for averting crimes. By enshrining the concept of non-indifference to mass crimes in the AU’s Constitutive Act, Africa has already exercised important leadership. The participants stated a clear preference for a regional approach.

The roundtable discussions came up with the following general recommendations:

• It is essential to work toward a multilateral rules based framework that defines the parameters of collective action to prevent or respond to RtoP crimes and violations in order to prevent instrumentalization of the concept
  
• RtoP and genocide prevention cannot be disconnected from the fundamental need for governance and judicial reform. Several participants even suggested adopting a 'responsibility to reform'
  
• More work needs to be done to clarify and elaborate the parameters of the relationship between the UN and regional organizations in the areas of capacity building, early warning, prevention, and enforcement
  
• The UN and other international actors should continue to support peacekeeping efforts by the AU and regional economic commissions, well as ramping up efforts to improve their prevention and early-warning capacities.
  
  

• Full text of document
• Publisher details
• Send to a friend