The Promise of the Media in Halting Mass Atrocities: A Conference Marking the 10th Anniversary of The Responsibility to Protect

Convened by the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies (MIGS) at Concordia University, "The Promise of the Media in Halting Mass Atrocities: A Conference Marking the 10th Anniversary of the Responsibility to Protect", will take place at the Mount Stephen Club in Montreal on October 21-22, 2011.

The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is a Canadian-sponsored initiative that seeks to prevent mass atrocity crimes.  The Simons Foundation was the private Canadian funder of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, which produced the R2P report in 2001.

The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) stipulates:

A. State sovereignty implies responsibility, and the primary responsibility for the protection of its people lies within the state itself.

B. Where a population is suffering serious harm, as a result of internal war, insurgency, repression or state failure, and the state in question is unwilling or unable to halt or avert it, the principle of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect.

The conference will address the fundamental need to sustain the relevance of R2P at the international level, so that mass atrocity crimes are prevented, and will discuss how the expanding, more inclusionary media landscape, with the emergence of social media as a key platform for reporting on humanitarian crises, has changed the way in which the international community responds to genocide. This focus is particularly important given the profound transformations that are presently reshaping the media landscape - from shrinking budgets to dwindling foreign bureaus - as well as the rapid evolution in new technologies that are making mass atrocities in seemingly distant countries suddenly immediate and ever harder to ignore. The conference will engage with these issues through keynote addresses, panels, and discussions featuring journalists, academic experts, and senior politicians, chosen for their ability to offer new insights and ideas.

MIGS hopes to spark debate on the challenges to crisis reporting, as well as the importance of social media as a key platform for reporting on humanitarian crises.

For more information and to register, please visit: www.migsr2pconference.com