ABSTRACT
Advocates of international human rights ‘legislation’ argue that this law is particularly important to protect individuals where states are weak and societies are segmented. The breakdown of weak and fragile states and internal conflict is often viewed today through the lens of crime and human rights abuse. For example, US Newsday journalist, Roy Gutman, writing in the OSCE, Freedom and Responsibility Yearbook, states: ‘The Bosnian conflict was, in retrospect, an enormous crime against humanity, masquerading as a war’ (Gutman 2000:150). The ‘New Wars’ thesis views conflict as motivated, not by political or geo-political aims but by private aims of plunder, black-market profiteering and corruption through the manipulation of particularist regional, ethnic or nationalist identities. Led by paramilitaries, local warlords and criminal gangs, the aim of conflict is understood to be that of destabilization and the sowing of fear and hatred through ethnic cleansing and mass killing (Kaldor 1999:6-9; Shaw 1999; Duffield 2001). Once the crisis situation is seen to have human rights abuses at its heart, the solution is then held to be ‘cosmopolitan law enforcement’, or the international imposition of international human rights law (Kaldor 1999:10-11). Human rights law, enforced by neutral external administrators, is necessary as a safeguard against the potential abuses and discrimination held to be likely to arise from leaving law to ethnic majorities brought to power through formally democratic processes.
