On 26 June 1945, with the almost unbridled carnage of the Second World War still raging around them, delegates from 50 countries signed into law the Charter of the United Nations. The preamble famously states:

"We the peoples of the United Nations determined: to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom."

Today the lofty aspirations engendered in this statement seem hollow indeed. The history of the past 60 years has been one of selfishness on the part of member states and a consistent failure to act decisively when human rights are threatened.

Yet the failure to realise the guarantees of the UN Charter has not just been the result of a lack of will. The international legal system has been established specifically to guarantee the sovereignty of each state over its own affairs except where a state's activities jeopardise international peace and security. In the aftermath of World War II this emphasis was both acceptable and understandable. The history of the preceding decades and indeed centuries had been one where the greatest threats to human life came as a consequence of expansionist tendencies directed by one state toward another.

This is no longer the case. In the last decade of the twentieth century, 79 of the 82 conflicts on the African continent were intra national as opposed to international. This move away from international conflict toward civil strife has concomitantly shifted the emphasis from military to civilian as the most common form of casualty arising out of conflict. At the start of the twentieth century, 15 per cent of casualties were civilian. By the end of the century, that figure had risen to 90 per cent.

The international system thus needs radical change to not only enable but compel the international community to act when states ignore the human rights of their own citizens. The legacy of colonialism is one reason why single state actors cannot be principally responsible for such humanitarian interventions. Another is the near impossibility, in today's geopolitical climate, of a viable and lasting solution to a state's problems that does not enjoy the support of contiguous states and the wider international community. It is therefore only international action that can have both the means and the legitimacy to resolve such situations.

This site does not advocate an open-doors state of affairs where any country can suddenly find itself occupied by foreign soldiers as a consequence of the smallest provocation. National sovereignty is still of vital importance, and individual states are and should be the best place to resolve their own problems. Yet where such states prove consistently unable or unwilling to resolve their human rights problems, the international community should have an enforceable responsibility to protect. Our loyalty to our country as citizens of a given state should be overridden where necessary by our wider loyalty to one another as members of the human race.

This site has been established to highlight these issues and to explore ways in which the international system might realistically be reformed so as to make the maintenance and where necessary the enforcement of universal human rights a truly realisable possibility. I hope you will find it of interest if not of use.