Holocaust Centre to host UN meeting with UK Parliamentary Group on Genocide Prevention
Aegis Trust
Holocaust Centre to host UN meeting with UK Parliamentary Group on Genocide Prevention
On 3 September the UN Secretary General’s Special Advisor on Genocide Prevention, Juan Mendez, will meet Clare Short, Chair of the newly formed All-Party Parliamentary Group on Genocide Prevention, together with field specialists at the UK Holocaust Centre in north Notts.
The Holocaust Centre is home to Genocide Prevention agency the Aegis Trust, which coordinates the Parliamentary Group. Aegis is also responsible for ?Protect Darfur’, a campaign that has lobbied hard in recent months for the UN to provide a mandate for protection of civilians in the ethnically cleansed west Sudanese region, where up to 300,000 Africans have been killed in the past two years and where over two million are now corralled in IDP camps, dependent on international aid for survival.
How international protection can really be provided for civilians at risk of ethnic cleansing or mass murder is the issue set to top the agenda.
“With the World Summit 2005 only weeks away, the meeting could not be more timely,” says Dr James Smith, Chief Executive of the Aegis Trust. “Provided governments do not water it down, the Summit’s outcome document will commit all signatories to the responsibility to protect citizens whose governments are either unable or unwilling to do it themselves. This could transform the international response to the next Rwanda or the next Darfur.”
Prof. Mendez said, “Genocide prevention is a principle of international law so fundamental that no nation may ignore it. The World Summit has a very significant opportunity to reinforce that.”
The international community has already backtracked on many existing commitments to prevent and counter genocide in the past though, and Clare Short has given a warning; “What is needed are mechanisms to enforce this principle otherwise the word won’t achieve anything.”
For more information, or to arrange interviews or photographs, contact Media Officer David Brown, tel: 01623 836627, mobile: 07812 640873, email: [email protected]