Tackling Human Rights Violations at an Early Stage: Developing a model for
Early Warning and Early Action. 

Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, USA, June 4 䴋 7, 2005.
By Prof. Dr. Fred Gr̹nfeld
University of Maastricht, Faculty of Law, Department International Law,
Maastricht Centre of Human Rights and University College Maastricht

Although the Tsunami took place during December 2004 in which a huge number 
of people were killed, more and more such natural disasters could be foreseen 
and expected  with a sophisticated early warning system. Any hurricane for 
instance in Florida has been predicted and a lot of precautionary measures 
to minimise the damage and loss of life were taken. Not only a hurricane but 
also for volcanic eruptions, earth quakes and a lot of other disasters caused
a modern warning system has been developed. This may be rather expensive and 
until now not every nation can afford to acquire this sophisticated equipment
but it is technically possible. Our question now is whether it will be 
possible to develop such an early warning system for the man-made disasters. 
Are these man-made disasters to be foreseen and to be prevented? In our view,
Gross Human Rights Violations will never occur all of a sudden. It is not the 
so-called trigger event that is to be seen as the cause of the gross human 
rights violations. The trigger event may indeed lead to a disaster at an 
enormous scale although the trigger event has not as such that magnitude. For 
instance the assassination of the Austrian successor to the throne Franz 
Ferdinand in the city of Sarajevo on June 28, 1914 or the shooting down of the 
airplane in Rwanda with the death of president Habyarimana on April 6, 1994 
were the direct causes of WWI and the Genocide in Rwanda but other underlying 
causes were manifest already a long time before.