Gareth Evans Says Mass Atrocity Crimes Are Everyone's Business

The Responsibility to Protect, the emerging international norm known as R2P, has marked a turning point in the prevention of major war crimes and other mass atrocities worldwide. Gareth Evans, one of the architects of the R2P principle, chronicled R2P’s development over the last decade in his 24 October CEU lecture titled “Responding to Mass Atrocity Crimes: The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) After Libya and Syria?”

Evans, a former Australian foreign minister who is currently Chancellor of Australian National University,  argued that the advent of R2P has marked a seismic shift in the ability of the international community to grapple with the normative issues which prevention of mass atrocities can raise and in the potential to generate political will worldwide, in order to ensure that such crimes no longer occur.

The R2P concept was initiated in the 2001 report of that name by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty – which Gareth Evans co-chaired with the prominent Algerian diplomat Mohammed Sahnoun – and endorsed unanimously by the United Nations General Assembly, sitting at the level of heads of state and government, during the 2005 World Summit. The next five years, until 2010, saw what Evans called much “tortured argument” about the scope and limits of the norm but, critically, “efforts by a number of spoiler-countries to turn back the clock on the 2005 consensus were rebuffed, and there were some clear-cut practical success stories, most of all in Kenya in early 2008.”

Since 2005, R2P has ensured that state sovereignty can no longer be taken a “license to kill” innocent civilians and that genocide, ethnic cleansing and other mass atrocity crimes are not “no one else’s business” but rather “everyone’s business.” In addition to holding states to account for the treatment of their own citizens, R2P has also “broadened the range of actors and responses” available in times of crises, Evans said, calling on the global community to assist any country unable to protect its population from atrocity crimes and allowing for robust action, including through sanctions and military intervention, in cases where a state refuses to abide by its international responsibilities to protect its people.

The R2P concept came of age in 2011, when the UN Security Council invoked R2P to authorize coercive action in the conflicts in both Libya and the Ivory Coast. “Libya was really a textbook example of how R2P is supposed to work after initial measures have failed,” Evans said.

Although Libya started off as a clear R2P success story, a number of countries (including China, Russia, Brazil and India) challenged how, in their view, the R2P mandate for international intervention in Libya was quickly transformed into one of regime change by the Western-led coalition conducting the military operations. “Innumerable implementation problems that will continue to arise every time the [R2P] principle is invoked,” Evans acknowledged, but nevertheless “the reality is that we are closer to consensus now on the nature and extent of the international responsibility to respond to these crimes than we have ever been.”

"None of the familiar tools in the atrocity prevention and conflict resolution toolbox are readily applicable to the current situation.”  The diplomatic route, Evans argued, might present the least feeble hope for some improvement of the situation, in order “to build institutional credibility for the rebels, to construct a plan for a political transition, and to persuade the Syrian leadership to accept a settlement.”

“The worst possible outcome would be for Syria to slide out of public consciousness into the realm of forgotten conflicts and forgotten atrocity crimes” Evans concluded. “We need to keep global attention focused and not let ourselves become desensitized. We need to maintain our shame at our inability to stop this carnage and not rest until we have done so.”

The event was sponsored by CEU's School of Public Policy (SPP). Wolfgang Reinicke, dean of SPP, introduced Evans and CEU President and Rector John Shattuck moderated the discussion.