Raymond Kwun Sun Lau, PhD candidate, Asia Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, The University of Queensland Intervention to stop mass atrocities in northern Uganda: first protection, then justice?

There has been a change in expectations about international response to mass atrocities in the post-Cold War era and, in particular, the aftermath of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. In a bid to ensure that the world never again fails to act, the establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 1998 and the adoption of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle in the 2005 World Summit mark the birth of two forms of responsibilities: responsibility to punish and responsibility to protect. The interaction of R2P with the ICC, however, reflects an inherent tension between protection of civilians and punishment of perpetrators in the temporal trajectory of international society’s response to mass atrocities. Using northern Uganda as a case study, this paper explores the relationship between R2P and the ICC by questioning the temporal ordering of R2P-ICC linkages in international society’s response to the twenty-five-year-old conflict. In particular, it explains why invoking ICC judicial intervention instead of R2P political action in the first place tends to be unsuccessful in stopping the ongoing mass atrocities in northern Uganda.