Taking the Prevention of Genocide Seriously Media Incitement to Genocide Viewed in the Light of the Responsibility to Protect

The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is a norm of international relations developed in the 2000’s to address past failures by the international community to prevent incidents of mass violence occurring in various parts of the world. Its central theme is that States hold a primary responsibility to protect persons within their territories from mass violence, genocide, gross violations of human rights and other (man-made) humanitarian catastrophes. Where a State is unwilling or unable to fulfil this responsibility, the R2P norm requires that secondary responsibility must be borne by the international community. In this article, the authors argue that effective genocide prevention requires greater attention to one leading contributory factor to genocidal violence: incitement of violence by the media. The article investigates the extent to which the R2P norm (and general international law on which it is based) recognizes a State obligation to stop media broadcasts which incite genocide. Importantly, the authors address the thorny question of how to draw the line between incitement to genocidal violence against which preventive measures may be taken, and mere hate speech which to a certain extent is protected by international law rules on the freedom of speech. A key argument of the authors is that in defining incitement to genocide for genocide prevention purposes, reliance should not be placed exclusively on the definition of the term developed in international criminal law for the rather different purpose of prosecuting and establishing responsibility for genocide that has already occurred. In other words, incitement to genocide for prevention purposes should be defined to include certain situations of hate speech which may not satisfy the threshold for individual criminal responsibility for incitement to genocide in international criminal law. The article is an interdisciplinary collaboration bringing together perspectives from Okany and Hoffman’s respective fields of expertise - international law and communication science.