By Erna Paris, The Ottawa Citizen, September 3, 2011
There’s a very old game being played out before our eyes and the stakes are high. Members of the Gadhafi family have found sanctuary in Algeria, the welcoming country next door; and we may be sure that Moammar is also looking for an escape route across the border. [more]
Erna Paris
Globe and Mail, May 4, 2011
Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the prosecutor-in-chief of the International Criminal Court, will address the United Nations Security Council on Wednesday for the first time since Feb. 26, the day the world organization unanimously referred the abuses taking place in Libya to the ICC. The historic moment deepened just three weeks later when the council voted to enforce a no-fly zone over Libya and to use all means necessary short of foreign occupation to protect civilians, thus actualizing UN legislation known as the “responsibility to protect.” For the first time, the pursuit of justice, including accountability for crimes against humanity and major war crimes, was harmonized with international diplomacy in real time. Since the post-Cold War genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda, global outrage over massive human-rights violations has been quietly nudging conventional realpolitik in directions that privileged international law. [more]
Globe and Mail, February 28, 2011
Since the Cold War ended two decades ago, the United Nations has undergone two near-death experiences. In 1994, it undermined its credibility by watching passively as thousands of Rwandans were slaughtered. In 1995, its “safe haven” in Srebrenica was easily overrun by Bosnian Serbs. Yet, the world body did accomplish something important that decade when it established temporary international criminal courts for Yugoslavia and Rwanda to prosecute the major perpetrators of those genocides. [more]
By Erna Paris | Illustration by Barry Blitt
The Walrus, March 2011
It was November 26, 2009, and I happened to be in Ottawa with a few hours to spare; so, on a citizen’s whim, I decided to drop in on Question Period in Canada’s House of Commons. I was a small girl the first time I sat in the historic visitors’ gallery that looms over the rows of members’ seats on both sides of the political divide. My father was determined that his children witness what he thought were essential places and events, and the House was high on his parental to-do list. I was properly impressed by the sight of grown-ups debating across the parliamentary aisle, waving sheaves of papers at one another and occasionally jabbing the air with their index fingers. Continue reading »
By Erna Paris, Globe and Mail, September 27, 2010
Seventy-three years after the Imperial Japanese Army stormed the Chinese metropolis of Nanking and massacred an estimated 260,000 civilians, survivors and their descendants still wait for justice — and for a full acknowledgment of the crimes. The Japanese government has provided neither. [more]
Erna Paris is the author of seven acclaimed books of literary non-fiction and the winner of ten national and international writing awards. More »
