Thursday 25 March 2010

thoughts on humanitarian intervention

have been expressed by my intellectual hero (one of them), Norman Geras, read them here, in response to a curious article by Mark Mazower.  You might agree.  You might not.  You might find it makes you think.  You might turn back to your copy of the Guardian with a contemptuous sneer.  You might even wonder why it was thought a matter of such urgency to create international legal human rights norms after the Second World War, and why those rights are now thought  to be relative and not universal by most of the so-called left and intellectuals in much of Europe and north America.  Or you might not care.  Something that occurs to me in this context.  Here in Europe, in the European Union, Roma women have to give birth in what are called "Gypsy Rooms" in hospitals, and are routinely sterilised there without their knowledge and against their will.  This happens in Slovakia.  Is it OK? And if not then what?

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