The following remarks were delivered by Professor the Hon Gareth Evans at the 2024 Evans-Sahnoun Lecture on the Responsibility to Protect, co-hosted by the Permanent Mission of Ireland to the United Nations in New York on  5 November 2024.

We are all, I guess, familiar with Kofi Annan’s challenge to the UN General Assembly in 2000 “If humanitarian intervention is indeed an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica – to gross and systematic violations of human rights that offend every precept of our common humanity?”

It was that challenge which led directly – through the successive mechanisms of the Canadian-sponsored International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) which I had the privilege of co-chairing with my dear late friend and colleague Mohamed Sahnoun in 2001, the S-G’s own High Level Panel on Threats Challenges and Change of which I was a member in 2004, and the UN’s 60^th Anniversary World Summit of 2005 – to the conceptual creation, and then unanimous global embrace, of the principles of the Responsibility to Protect (‘R2P’).

But I guess now, nearly twenty years on from the World Summit, we are also all acutely aware of just how much strain those principles are under.  Following the breakdown in Security Council consensus since 2011, and the manifest failure to prevent or effectively respond to a whole new series of atrocity crime catastrophes in Sri Lanka, Syria, Myanmar, Sudan, Ethiopia, Ukraine, Gaza and elsewhere – a number of skeptical and cynical voices from both the global South and global North  (or if you prefer the alternative shorthand, ‘the West and the Rest’) are being heard to argue that the whole R2P norm-creation enterprise has been a complete waste of time or worse.

Most disconcertingly of all to me is that some of the strongest original supporters of the Responsibility to Protect are now ducking away from even using that terminology, arguing that it is at worst  counter-productive and at best a dead-letter.

So I think it is time, 24 years after Kofi Annan’s challenging question, for another big one to be asked and answered: “If R2P is not the right set of standard-setting principles and prescriptions to guide the international community in its response to unconscionable mass atrocity crimes – gross and systematic violations of human rights that offend every precept of our common humanity – then what is the alternative?”

Is there another set of principles anyone can identify, using different terminology and concepts, addressing both prevention and reaction, which is remotely capable of finding common ground between the global South and North, as R2P did in 2005 (and in fact continues largely to do in the UN General Assembly)?  Do we abandon altogether the search for a common, energizing normative foundation for our response to mass atrocity crimes, and put all our focus just on ad hoc development assistance and institution-building?

Do we make prevention the entire focus of our activity, and abandon altogether the hope of effective response at the sharpest end of the reaction spectrum in those extreme cases when prevention has failed and people are dying in their thousands, or scores or hundreds of thousands? If that’s going too far, should we go all the way back to accepting that there is indeed a “right of humanitarian intervention” which the big military players should, at their discretion and without Security Council or other constraint, be able to either ignore or to exercise with all guns blazing?

Or do we go back to the other extreme and accept, as some in the global South have always asserted (with buyer’s remorse at having gone along with the 2005 consensus), that state sovereignty really is absolute, and that mass atrocity crimes perpetrated behind state walls really are none of the rest of the world’s business?  Do we retreat to acceptance of the kind of realpolitik whereby a US Secretary of State could say to his Thai counterpart, as Henry Kissinger did seven months into the Khmer Rouge’s reign of genocidal slaughter in 1975: “You should tell the Cambodians that we’ll be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in our way”?

You won’t be surprised that my own strong view is that I see no credible alternative to R2P as a set of standard-setting principles, and that my answer to all the other corollary questions I have just asked is in the negative. I know that I am not alone in that response – not least here in this room. But the question for those of us who still really believe in the cause is what do we need to do now to keep the flame of R2P alive.

I think the answer for supporters of R2P, and the governments of those of our  countries who do have significant international influence and are willing to use it in this cause, is to embrace  two broad strategies in all their engagement and advocacy around atrocity prevention and response. First, to emphasise the successes as well as acknowledge the failures of R2P. Second, to clearly articulate how it is in every country’s own national interest to take seriously, and be seen o  respond decently to conscience-shocking atrocity crimes occurring elsewhere, even when there is no clear national security or economic return in doing so.

As to the defending the R2P record, for all that continues to go wrong, real progress has been made against most of the benchmarks – normative, institutional, preventive and reactive – we R2P advocates set ourselves two decades ago.

Normatively, as evidenced in annual General Assembly debates and multiple Security Council resolutions, ‘R2P’ still commands a degree of global acceptance and traction unimaginable for ‘humanitarian intervention’.

Institutionally, real progress has been made in developing both international legal accountability mechanisms, and national civilian and military response preparedness, with the emergence of many new monitoring, investigating and evidence-collecting mechanisms.

 Preventively, R2P-driven strategies have had a number of under-noticed successes, notably in stopping the recurrence of violence in Kenya, the West African cases of Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire and The Gambia, and in Kyrgyzstan, while volatile situations such as Burundi get recurring Security Council attention of a kind unknown to Rwanda in the 1990s.

But we have to acknowledge that reactively – ensuring effective response to atrocity crises actually under way, the fourth benchmark  –this is obviously at best still work in progress. There have been partial successes – more often involving diplomatic than military pressure – in Kenya, Côte d’Ivoire, Congo, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic, and even Libya (at least initially, in stopping a massacre in Benghazi). But also too many failures, not helped by the re-emergence of major power rivalry and obstruction in the Security Council.

That said, neither China nor Russia have been totally hostile to the concept of R2P – with Russia even calling it in aid to try to justify its initial assaults on Georgia and Ukraine, so getting them to eventually return to a more consensual approach may not be a totally lost cause. Though it would help in this respect if the P3 could bring itself to acknowledge that it over-reached in Libya in 2011 – perhaps by now accepting the attractions of the complementary concept of ‘Responsibility While Protecting’ advanced by Brazil at the time.

As to my second strategy, advocating for effective atrocity response to be taken seriously as a key national interest, not just something best left to missionaries, boy scouts and those naïve to the realities of domestic politics, I have long argued that foreign policy makers, and those in the media and elsewhere who influence them, far too often still think of national interests only in terms of the familiar duo of security and prosperity.

We need to think in terms of every country having a third national interest: being, and being seen to be, a decent country, what I like to call a ‘good international citizen’ – being, in other words, the kind of country that cares about other people’s suffering and does everything it reasonably can to alleviate it, even if there is no direct or obvious security or economic benefit to be derived from doing so. One of the key benchmarks for being so regarded is doing everything one reasonably can to prevent the horror and misery of war and mass-atrocity crimes, and to alleviate their consequences, including for refugees fleeing their impact.

My argument is that being and being seen to be a good international citizen is not just a moral but a national interest imperative. The returns from good, selfless international behavior are more than just warm inner glows. They come from the instinct for reciprocity that such behavior generates. They come from the impetus to collective problem-solving that comes from bringing a cooperative, not just wholly self-interested, mindset to the negotiating table. And above all the returns are reputational – what we now think of as ‘soft power’: countries so perceived are those others want to invest in and trade with, to visit, to study in, and to trust in security terms. And when it comes to the domestic politics of international decency, there is plenty of evidence that our publics are far more supportive of genuinely selfless behavior than are most of the politicians who fear their negative reaction.

Just two more points on my to-do list before I conclude.

It is really important to keep giving material support to those often financially strained civil society organizations – like the sponsor of this event the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, the Asia Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, and the Global Responsibility to Protect journal– who are striving mightily to keep the R2P flame alight, through their research and advocacy, and their and support for critical mechanisms  and positions like the UN Friends of R2P and Special Adviser on R2P, so many superbly dedicated and selfless holders of that position are with us here  today.

Last but not least, it is crucially important to stay optimistic. If we want to change the world for the better, we must start by believing in the possibility of change. Optimism is self-reinforcing just as pessimism is self-defeating. The concept of R2P has shown itself capable of capturing genuine cross-cultural repulsion at the kind of atrocities which killed some 80 million people during the course of the 20^th Century, of doing so in language which for most people is instinctively attractive, and creating consensus for action where none previously existed.  It would be a tragedy now to succumb to the cynics and skeptics, to fail to see the continuing force of R2P as an energizing ideal, and abandon the aspiration to see it fully and effectively implemented in all its dimensions. I believe very much that outcome is still possible. And I hope very much that you share that belief, and will act upon it.