ABSTRACT

Since the nineteenth century at least, the commission of genocide and mass atrocities has provoked calls for international action to save the victims.1 From the 1820s to the 1870s, for example, groups of activists collectively known as ‘atrocitarians’ agitated for armed intervention to protect Christians in Greece, Syria and Bulgaria. At the century’s end, the US invaded Cuba partly in response to calls from former President Theodore Roosevelt that it should act to put an end to Spanish atrocities there.2 In the twentieth century, the Armenian genocide, Holocaust, and more recent genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda all generated public agitation aimed at pushing governments to act to stop the slaughter. The present century is no different. Many activists in various parts of the world maintain that those with the power to have done so should have intervened in Darfur to protect civilians from their tormentors. This sort of activism is not surprising, because there is an overlapping and global moral consensus which holds that it is wrong to deliberately kill civilians in war or in peacetime pogroms and genocides.3 Although this consensus became manifest in the laws of war only after the Second World War, non-combatant immunity is a deeply held moral principle with a long history, shared by most of the world’s major ethical traditions.4 Since then, the international community has made non-combatant immunity a customary principle of international law and its violation a universal crime.