In 1994 leaders of national governments and international institutions failed to stop the slaughter of the Tutsi population in Rwanda, where over 800,000 people were massacred in 100 days. The "governments most involved in Rwanda - France, Belgium, and the United States " BBC NEWS March 04 had substantial information about the situation on the ground but they shared this information with only a few others. Refusing to label the conflict as genocide and acting accordingly, the international community failed Rwanda, Africa and indeed the world.
             When philosophers Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes first elaborated the notion of sovereignty in the 16th and 17th centuries, they were concerned with establishing the legitimacy of a single hierarchy of domestic authority. In the contemporary world, sovereignty primarily has been linked with the idea that states are autonomous and independent from each other. Within their own boundaries, the members of a polity are free to choose their own form of government. A necessary result of this claim is the principle of nonintervention: One state does not have a right to intervene in the internal affairs of another.
             The United Nations Charter endorsed both human rights and the classic sovereignty principle of nonintervention. This was when intervention was traditionally defined as a deliberate incursion into a state without it's consent by some outside agency, in order to change the functioning, policies and goals of its government. This is the essential argument that has been used time and time again to justify the world's non-action. The 20-plus human rights accords that have been signed during the last half century cover a wide range of issues including genocide, torture, slavery, refugees, stateless persons, women's rights, racial discrimination, children's rights, and forced labor. These U.N. agreements, however, have few enforcement mechanisms, and even their provisions for re...