General Announcements - February 23, 2011
IPI's Edward C. Luck Tells Al Jazeera: ''Good Reason to Believe'' Crimes Against Humanity Have Occurred in Libya
Asked on Al Jazeera on February 23rd if crimes against humanity were being committed in Libya, Dr. Edward C. Luck, IPI Senior Vice President for Research and Programs, said that though "we don't have direct access, there is certainly good reason to believe" they were.
Dr. Luck, who is also a UN Special Adviser to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon for Responsibility to Protect (RtoP), said that the international community has directly told Col. Muammar Qaddafi and his entrenched regime what is expected of him, and that the Secretary-General made these concerns clear during a forty-minute phone call with the Libyan leader.
Dr. Luck said that Col. Qaddafi and his associates have to know that they are "very much isolated in the international community" and that they are adopting a bunker-like mentality with "no good way out."
"States were created to protect people, not to persecute them," he said. "And certainly when you order aircraft and random fire and bring in mercenaries against unarmed protesters, you've violated so many international laws, and clearly, he has to be held accountable, and others in his regime do for, what looks like at least, crimes against humanity."
On March 15, 2011, Dr. Luck was quoted in the Christian Science Monitor as saying, "It's true that Qaddafi's particularly egregious actions have spurred the international community in ways that another crisis might not have, and that has forged a unity in the organization that we don't see every day. But we're also seeing the invoking of universal norms and standards that go to the heart of what the UN is about, and that's something you wouldn't have imagined even a few months ago."
Watch Dr. Luck on Al Jazeera:
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Recent Events
May 10, 2012
Arbour: What the Rule of Law Means
“In my understanding of the rule of law, fundamentally, what the rule of law means is that it embraces the principle of equality before the law,” Louise Arbour, president of the International Crisis Group (ICG), told an IPI audience on May 10, 2012. Ms. Arbour outlined that this means that no one is above the law and everyone has both equal protection and equal benefit of the law. 
May 03, 2012
Shachtman: Cyber Threats Akin to South Bronx, Not Pearl Harbor
“There’s not a danger of a cyber Pearl Harbor… it’s more like the South Bronx circa 1999, where there’s a danger that it becomes such a tough neighborhood that no one wants to set up shop there and people move out,” Noah Shachtman, editor of the Danger Room blog at Wired magazine and non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution, told an IPI audience at a panel on cyber security on May 3, 2011.
April 27, 2012
Preventing Conflicts in Africa: The Role of Early Warning and Response Systems
An April 27th roundtable discussion at IPI titled “Preventing Conflicts in Africa: The Role of Early Warning and Response Systems” examined the progress, prospects and challenges of regional and international early warning and response mechanisms to monitor, anticipate, and mitigate potential conflict situations in Africa.