Wilfully Blind: the Security Council’s Response to Genocide in Rwanda

The UN Security Council’s response to the Rwanda genocide was a significant moment in history. It changed the face of international law, cementing individual criminal responsibility for atrocities in the canon of international law. It also saw the Security Council respond to mass atrocities without the consent of the state in question in a manner that ran counter to historical practice. But all of these outcomes are haunted by the fact that decisions made by the Security Council in the build up to the genocide served to create the conditions on the ground that allowed genocide to flourish. This intervention conducts a critical discourse analysis of the statements made by the Permanent Five members of the Security Council justifying these decisions in the context of whether Rwanda constituted a ‘threat to the peace’ under article 39 of the UN Charter, concluding that Security Council through its decisions was complicit in the genocide.