Rights and justice

This essay points out the fragility of the arguments most often used by humanitarian organizations to justify their support for an international criminal court. Questioning NGOs' infatuation with punitive justice, Fabrice Weissman argues that humanitarian organizations should advocate for politics of aid and mediation rather than for a global moral order based on judicial punishment and just war.

Humanitarian law was designed as a normative framework, not as an indictment. With this in mind, Rony Brauman tries to define what constitutes a human shield.

To embark upon a study of this theme is to enter a field strewn with contradictory representations linked to a highly sensitive issue – the limits of our responsibility – that has generated endless disagreements and debates on our “identity” and the existence or nonexistence of a role for MSF “beyond care”. 

The document analyses and describes the different initiatives, experiences and positions that MSF has had with regard to international investigations and judicial proceedings.

Definitions are often the first step toward granting or denying a person's rights. Now in thoroughly revised and updated edition, the Guide provides precise meaning and content for terms such as terrorism, refugee, genocide, and intervention concepts.

Rony Brauman decribes how the qualification of the conflict in Darfur as genocide leads only to a dead end and warns against the abuse of this concept.

Rony Brauman analyses the de-politicization and criminalisation process of the conflict in Darfur, resulting from an exclusively ethnic reading of this crisis and by the inappropriate use of the concept of "genocide".

Rony Brauman questions the link between public health decisions and the right to health care. 

Eyal Weizman, the founder of « Forensic Architecture » at the Goldsmiths College (University of London) came to present the project as well as a number of his works at a MSF - Crash conference organised at MSF.

In 1998 MSF decided to support the creation of the International Criminal Court. 10 years later MSF stated that it ‘would not cooperate and would not transmit any information to the ICC'. How can we explain this change of position?