Bearing Witness to Libya’s Human Rights Tragedy

The 2011 Western and Arab intervention in Libya was born of the lessons learned (or, as the case may be, not learned) from the international community’s previous two decades of responding to the outbreak of conflict and commission of gross violations of human rights in various contexts. More precisely, the Libyan case was informed by the international community’s previous failure to stop the horrific genocide in Rwanda and to halt what had been up to that point the largest mass killing on European soil, in Srebrenica, since the Second World War.

During those anxious months in the late winter and early spring of 2011 as observers watched events unfolding in Libya, these lessons ‘weighed heavily on the decision-makers in Washington, London, Paris and beyond’.[1] The world was monitoring a domestic Libyan uprising which was being met, particularly in the city of Benghazi, by the excessive use of force by units under the command of Muammar Qaddafi. The ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) doctrine was invoked by some international figures to push for the ultimate passage of UNSCR 1973 on the premise of preventing potential crimes against humanity and indeed the resolution contains language pertaining to R2P.[2] This UN resolution paved the way for the NATO and Arab intervention in Libya, which morphed from a protection mission to one of regime change, leading to Qaddafi’s downfall.

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