Two weeks ago, front-page photos from Egypt of bloodied protestors and stone-throwing battles shocked and awed, eventually contributing to Hosni Mubarak’s overthrow. News from Libya this week, lacking any photos or clarity, has been even more disconcerting as Mommar al Gadhafi slaughters his people and pledges to rid his country of dissent house by house if he has to.

Having imposed a near-complete information blackout in Tripoli, Gadhafi has reportedly ordered the use of warplanes, helicopter gunships and high-caliber machine guns on unarmed civilians. For the sake of sanity, thinking about international human rights usually happens in international relations classes. When a zany dictator starts killing his own people, though, we have to dust off the notes and think hard about why such crimes still occur.

Arguably the most important development in human-rights norms over the last decade was the agreement at the 2005 U.N. World Summit to draw up the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ doctrine. The specifics are complicated, but the basic gist is this: States ought to protect their citizens from violence that qualifies as a proper human-rights violation, but when states fail to do so, the international community has agreed to a responsibility to step in.

The ‘Responsibility to Protect’ doctrine was a major step forward for the United Nations, but it has practically no legal teeth. It does, however, represent an important commitment by countries that have the capability to prevent tragic violence, and breaking that commitment presents a serious moral failure.

The International Crisis Group published a clear set of demands for international action on Tuesday, including an immediate no-fly zone over Libya to prevent airborne attacks on civilians, strong sanctions against the Gadhafi regime and the promise of international prosecution for crimes against humanity. Last evening, President Barack Obama made a speech reiterating his administration’s and the international community’s condemnation of human-rights violations in Libya. Condemnation means nothing for Libyan citizens ripped in half by high-powered weapons — it isn’t enough.

The International Crisis Group’s demands are sufficiently modest to be reasonable, but the situation is extremely complex, and foreign service officers probably haven’t slept in weeks. One possible explanation for inaction goes as follows: By banning foreign journalists and shutting off the Internet, the Gadhafi regime has successfully barred clear evidence of human-rights atrocities from the rest of the world. That the modern world allows this is absurd: If a leader can successfully control information coming out of his country, that leader can order brutal violence with impunity, and international actors can’t do much about it.

Absurd dilemmas for the international community, such as this, are encouraged by the clearly inadequate state of the United Nations. Serious reform needs to happen, and the full range of possibilities lies outside the scope of this column. The most extreme, naïve reform is the creation of an international military response force for quick deterrence of clear state-sponsored violence. Instead, cynics might argue simply and justifiably that the United Nations is the best we can hope for in the reasonable future. Calls for extreme reform might simply be the pipedreams of idealistic undergraduates.

This line of reasoning may be right most of the time, but in the face of ludicrous and preventable civilian deaths, naïveté is completely appropriate. We should feel outraged, and we should argue for the United Nations to get better, no matter how implausible the argument may be. Flagrant human death is a simple thing, a naïve thing, and it clearly overrides the complexities of international diplomacy. We shouldn’t have to wait for drastic front-page pictures for change — by the time we see any from Libya, atrocities will have been erased and the evil done.

Scott Collison is a senior philosophy and physics major. His columns appear occasionally, and he can be reached at smcollis@syr.edu.