The first of these events was the Rwandan genocide of 1994, in which, estimates suggest that 800,000 people were systematically killed in the space of 100 days by the Hutu majority government against the Tutsi population. Within this conflict, the UN fundamentally failed in protecting the Tutsi population in Rwanda from the ethnic-cleansing of the Hutu regime. The available evidence affirms this claim, as a small force of only 2500 soldiers known as United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) was sent to Rwanda in an attempt to alleviate the conflict.(Hehir 2005, p61) This small force however was a futile and unconvincing effort on the part of the UN to palliate the genocide, as, not only did they severely lack arms, but the credible warnings and shocking reports sent by the UNAMIR to the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) in New York were ignored or rebuffed, over concerns that the UNAMIR may, “exceed the mandate and endanger the lives of UN peacekeepers.”(Ibid) It certainly could be argued that the United States was particularly culpable and restricted the UN in its ability to act as the Clinton administration had made the conscious decision to stop supporting significant UN missions after the torture and televised death of 18 American soldiers in Somalia during a UN humanitarian assistance programme.(Oppong and Gritzner 2015, p60) However this has not stopped the lack of coherent humanitarian intervention in Rwanda being termed by Paul Kennedy as “the lowest point in the UN’s history” and “the single worst decision the United Nations ever made.”(Kennedy 2006, p103) The lack of action undertaken by the UN in the face of the Rwandan genocide sparked international debate surrounding the merits, legality and necessity of humanitarian intervention. Further to this, it raised the problematic debate surrounding unconditional sovereignty, questioning whether the international community had the right to intervene in the case of a humanitarian disaster. (UN, n.d)

These questions would yet again be raised by a second event which proved to be a further catalyst for the emergence of the responsibility to protect doctrine, was the so-called ‘humanitarian intervention’ undertaken by NATO in Kosovo during 1999. Unlike in Rwanda the international community or more specifically NATO undertook military action. This action first started with international condemnation of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) as seen through Security Council resolutions 1160, 1199, and 1998 which compelled the FRY to find a political resolution to the matter. However, when this was not achieved NATO initiated military action, manifesting itself in an eleven-week programme of systematic bombing in Kosovo in order to cease the, “humanitarian catastrophe resulting from the excessive