 Good morning, everyone. I'm Tom Carruthers. I'm Senior Vice President here at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The special pleasure for us to co-host this event today with the Center for International Human Rights of the Pritzker School of Law of Northwestern University. A commitment to international law has been a bedrock of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's work in the under 108 years of its existence. All across the 20th century, the Carnegie Endowment was engaged in supporting efforts to advance the rule of law, both the commitment of the United States to it and many of the crucial institutions forming the system of international law and organizations that's essential for global order. And the issue of war crimes was, of course, very much a part of that over the years. And unfortunately the issue remains very relevant today, and so when David Scheffer proposed doing this event, I jumped at the opportunity for us to co-host and renew the commitment of the United States, the community of many of you in the room who've worked on these issues and remain committed to them. And this event is a testament both to the continuing salience or crucial nature of this issue, but also the commitment of many in the United States to be productive players in helping to tackle the problem. And it's a special pleasure for me to do this together with David. David joined the endowment in 1989 and worked here for four years. I actually have a special debt of gratitude to David because when he left to join the Clinton administration it opened up a spot that I was able to fill. So David, thank you for that. Sometimes leaving is sweet as well. But as you know, at the State Department David did a lot of important work on this issue in the 1990s and of course became the first ambassador at large for war crimes issues and subsequent ambassadors will be with us here today and their deputies. Then David has continued this work with the United Nations and in his writings and other ways over the years and remains a stalwart in this field. So David, congratulations on your work over the years, which we value so much and thank you for coming back to Carnegie to do this event. Thanks to all of you for being here. We are live streaming this event on video and it will be on our website. So if you have friends or colleagues who you'd like to share parts of the event with, please do so in that way as well. You'll find it on our website. Without further ado, I'm going to turn it over to David who's going to talk a bit about the event and then he'll introduce Nick Burns who will be our first speaker. David, thank you. Thanks, Thomas. Thanks very much, Thomas. Well, good morning. Welcome to a legacy gathering which we've entitled 20 years confronting atrocity crimes. And it's co-hosted as Thomas said by the Center for International Human Rights at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law and by the Carnegie Endowment. Which is my former employer many years ago. I sometimes say to my friends that if Bill Clinton had not won the presidency in 1992, I would have enjoyed continuing to live happily ever after at the best think tank in the world. It is tremendous to see here today my colleagues, friends and all of you interested in the pursuit of international justice past, present and future. Many of you have been the craftsmen of a paradigm shift in world politics and indeed international law. 25 years ago when the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was created by the UN Security Council under the leadership of the U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Dr. Madeline Albright, none of us knew that the resurrection of the Nuremberg principles in our lifetimes would be so profoundly amplified in the creation and operation of so many war crimes tribunals. The world had its share then of massive crime scenes as it does today despite the empirical decline of transnational armed conflicts. The notion that political and military leaders would be held accountable or at least be at risk of being held accountable for masterminding genocide, crimes against humanity or serious war crimes, what we term atrocity crimes, was quite novel in 1993. When she became Secretary of State in 1997, Madeline Albright asked President Clinton to create the first ever ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, someone who would bring a sharp diplomatic focus and American leadership to the investigation and prosecution of atrocity crimes. It was the first such ambassadorship in U.S. history or, for that matter, world history and remain so today. I had the privilege of being the first such ambassador-at-large and my successors join us here today as well as our deputies who were so instrumental in pursuing the objectives of building and supporting war crimes tribunals, encouraging development of national courts to achieve accountability for atrocity crimes and seeking to prevent the commission of such crimes. We were at the forefront of the creation of the Yugoslav and Rwanda tribunals, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, the Special Tribunal for Lebanon and Specialist Courts in the Central African Republic and Kosovo, as well as the Permanent International Criminal Court. We also developed the means in our own government of helping prevent atrocity crimes from erupting into calamities. I often argue that the age of impunity is over, namely that political and military leaders can no longer assume that they will get a pass on orchestrating and masterminding the commission of atrocity crimes in order to protect and perpetuate their power. Some doubtless will evade the courtroom that we know. But the times of assuming that impunity is a right held by such leaders is simply no longer a credible argument. The vies is closing on them. Their sanctuaries are diminishing in number. The public's expectations for accountability grow with each day. International criminal law has been advanced so far during the last quarter century through the creation of the war crimes tribunals and the codification of atrocity crimes and treaties and national criminal codes that no leader can act under any assumption of impunity, despite the distressing rise of authoritarianism in recent years. So many of you worked hard day after day to build the edifice of international criminal justice that challenges pure evil robbing millions of the normal lives we cherish in America. Many of you who worked in the US government are here today. I see them. Jamie Bork, Sam Whitten, Michael Matheson, Sean Murphy, Bill Lietzow, Michael Marin, Anne Pham, Jennifer Glouderman, Jonathan Crock, Peter Hempch, Andy Baer, David Abramowitz, and so many others. We ambassadors and our deputies applaud you today. We are only here today because of you. We stood on your shoulders. There are many fresh challenges today both at home and abroad, and I truly hope that American leadership is sustained and indeed strengthened in the days ahead to confront atrocity crimes and advance one of our most cherished values, the rule of law. We have an exciting program today. We're going to hear from Nicholas Burns shortly, who I'm going to introduce. And then we'll have a panel of the former ambassadors moderated by John Bellinger. Then we'll have a very, very short break so you can comfortably get a cup of coffee. And then we're going to have a panel of three victims who will tell us their stories and the aftermath of their stories. And then we'll move straight into a panel moderated by Professor Beth Van Schaak, who was also a deputy to Ambassador Rapp, of the deputies who worked with the ambassadors through these years in the State Department. And then we will have a buffet luncheon that will be presided over and spoken. We will receive a luncheon address from Tim Reiser, who is one of the key staffers on Capitol Hill in the field of accountability and what we do every day in these offices and is on the Appropriations Committee as a minority staff member. So you will get an insight from Capitol Hill at a very critical moment in the life of Capitol Hill, as you all know. I am deeply honored to introduce our keynote speaker, Nicholas Burns. You have his bio in the program. He has been Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, the U.S. Ambassador to NATO and to Greece, a State Department spokesman. You're in my watch in the 1990s, and it is afterlife a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School. I consider Nick Burns one of the most level-headed and brilliant Foreign Service officers of our generation. Nick, the floor is yours. David, thank you very much. Good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here and a real pleasure to be on this dais with Ambassador David Scheffer. We are contemporaries. We worked in the Clinton administration together. We're both great admirers of Madeleine Albright and Secretary Clinton. And I think we can truly say that you were present at the creation. You led the creation, and you were the pathfinder in this very difficult job of being ambassador in charge of investigating mass atrocities in war crimes. So kudos to you, David, for pulling us all together this morning. And it's a pleasure. I'm looking forward to seeing some old friends and hearing from a lot of very smart people this morning. I want to say I think this is a very important conference because we're talking about a vital American interest and a vital universal and global interest. And that's standing up for human rights and prosecuting those responsible for atrocity crimes. I certainly want to thank the Carnegie Endowment and my very good friend and former compatriot, Bill Burns, who leads this institution for hosting us today. This is right in the middle of what the Carnegie Endowment has stood for in its long life. It's particularly gratifying for me to be with so many distinguished American diplomats, and David has just named many of them. I worked and had the great honor to serve with many of them during the last several decades in the Clinton administration and the George W. Bush administration. And we all owe a debt of gratitude to our ambassadors who are at large for war crimes issues. I've mentioned David, Pierre Prosper, who's sitting right here in the front. Clint Williamson, who I just said hello to, we hadn't seen each other in a long time. Steven Rapp, and also Ambassador Todd Buchwald. Todd and I worked together through lots of difficult issues in our career. He's had such a distinguished career, he's still serving at the State Department. To John Shattuck, who was our Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights when we worked for Secretary Christopher and Secretary Albright. To our great, formal legal advisor of the State Department, John Belinger, who's going to be chairing the next panel with whom I worked very closely and I'm very close friends. All of these people held high the American commitment to human rights to helping the victims of genocide and mass atrocities and torture and abuse. And I think it is important to salute President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Mellon Albright. They created this ambassadoral position in the first place and David reminded me in a phone call earlier this week that we are the only country that has such a position. The United States, in fact, has been the central country worldwide that has kept these issues at the center of attention of all of us around the world. President Clinton, President George W. Bush, President Barack Obama, they all made a clear commitment that we would pursue justice on behalf of victims. They appointed the public servants that I've just saluted. They made pursuing war criminals and trying them a priority and they held up a very high standard of intolerance for atrocity crimes in the world today. We do know, of course, as Americans that our country has sometimes not met our own high standards for how we should act in the world. Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, the use of torture are reminders that we too must always strive to meet our obligations to other countries as well as to ourselves and our own values enshrined in our founding documents. In this sense, I believe that President Obama was right to return to the United States as an observer to the International Criminal Court. And this baton of ethical leadership in our country that President Clinton and President George W. Bush and President Obama all tried to uphold on the issue of atrocities and war crimes, that baton is now being passed to President Donald Trump. And I think all of us look forward to his expeditious nomination of an ambassador-at-large who will continue this vital work. It's a good sign, I think, that Secretary Tillerson, who's conducting a top-to-bottom review of the structure of the State Department, his functions has chosen to retain this position. There are lots of special ambassadorships that have been retired as positions. Maybe that's a good thing that so many were. Maybe that will streamline the work of the department, return authority to the bureaus and to the professionals like Todd, in whom we all have great confidence. But it's good that this position has been retained. And that shows how important it is that the United States continue in this vein. There's no question that we've got to continue to leave the world in preventing mass atrocities and bringing those responsible for them to justice. We have a clear self-interest in doing so. We Americans want to live in a world where all people, including ethnic and religious minorities, those on the losing sides of civil wars, the weak and the dispossessed, can be protected from the worst acts of humanity. And as a democratic nation, an immigrant nation, a multi-ethnic and multi-religious nation, we find that there isn't a conflict in the world where some sizable segment of our own population does not have an interest. In this sense, we have an obligation and a responsibility to act when we see such crimes. Our parents and grandparents, at least for the older ones among us, the greatest generation, acted with resolve at Nuremberg and Tokyo after the genocide and crimes against humanity during the Second World War. In the wake of that war, we've resolved never again. We built memorials to the victims of the Holocaust, for instance, and nearly every state in the United States. The Holocaust Museum here in Washington, where I am very proud to serve in the Committee of Conscience, is a living memorial to the victims and a living testament that we are responsible to act for justice in our own time. And that's the real animating message and function of the Holocaust Museum. All of us here today, who served in the United States government during the Cold War until today, understand what's at stake. We did not respond to the crimes against humanity that swept over Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, killing at least 1.7 million Cambodians. We did not respond in time to save the 800,000 victims of the Rwandan genocide in the spring and summer of 1994. We certainly waited too long to intervene in the Bosnia War between 1991 and the summer of 1995. Hundreds of thousands of people died during those years. Two and a half million people were made homeless. I remember vividly when I was State Department spokesman in July 1995, July 10, 11, and 12, 1995, to be specific, that it was the Srebrenica massacre that shamed us in the Department of State in the White House to reconsider the cost of our inaction and to resolve to act when the next attacks came as they surely would against the Muslim population, the civilian population of Bosnia-Herzegovina. We were too late in acting, but when the next attack came, August 28, 1995, the Bosnian Serbs shelling of the Sarajevo marketplace killed 35 people that morning. Finally, we resolved to act. We were shamed into action following what we had not done in the four previous years. In the United States, military and NATO went into action to bomb the Bosnian Serb government. Richard Holbrook, with all his considerable skills, went into action and achieved a ceasefire. And then that miraculous, brilliant negotiation by Holbrook, 21 days at Dayton, Ohio, November 1995, to secure the peace. It's been an uneasy peace in some ways, an artificial peace in terms of the institutions that had to be constructed, but a peace that's held and a peace that has ensured that human rights violations that had racked that country have not taken place since. And then came Kosovo and Afghanistan and Iraq and Darfur and the killing fields of Syria and South Sudan, the Central African Republic, Congo, Myanmar in 2017 and into this year, 2018. I've often thought as the diplomat now as I teach that the most difficult decision over the last several decades for our presidents and our secretaries of state and their counterparts around the world is this. When do we intervene in the name of justice in someone else's civil war? And when do we not? We made the mistake of not intervening with the benefit of hindsight. And Secretary Albright and President Clinton have said this publicly on many occasions when we didn't intervene in Rwanda. That was a clear mistake. We made a mistake in recent years of not intervening to help the 12 million homeless in a population of 22.4 million in Syria, more than half the population, homeless inside the country or outside the country in that devastating civil war and the most profound humanitarian crisis since 1945. We know that we cannot intervene everywhere, but we also know there are times when we must use our power for the good when we can make a clear difference. And these are the difficult decisions that our presidents, our secretaries of state, our ambassadors at large have to make on behalf of the United States. But once the guns are silent, we can and we must always insist that justice is done, that murderers are brought to trial, that war crimes tribunals be established to help war-torn societies make sense of what happened, to punish those who must be punished to find a way for those societies to heal themselves. And that's a moral and it's a political imperative of justice, and it places a special responsibility on the shoulders of Americans because of our extraordinary power in the world. We're the leader of the West. It's an older world, a word to describe a political alliance of countries, but at a time when Russia and China are pushing out in an authoritarian way, the West means something. And that's what the United States has to uphold. We are in many ways the author and guardian of the foundational documents of the West and of the free world. Woodrow Wilson's 14 points 100 years ago this year, the Atlantic Charter of August 1941 between FDR and Churchill, the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights, the United Nations Charter, the responsibility to protect in more recent times during the George W. Bush administration when Pierre and I were working together. So as we meet today, and this is why I thought this conference that David and all of you have put together, that he is so important, it's vital that President Trump take up this baton of leadership that has been bequeathed to him by his predecessors and frankly by all of you who have worked on these issues. He has to do that because Russia and China will not. In fact, Russia is shielding Bashar al-Assad from the judgment of the international community for his repeated use of chemical weapons, including last week and his slaughter of millions of innocent Syrians. Russia itself in the last several months has carried out barbaric bombings of civilian populations in Aleppo and just last week in Idlib province. China will not hold the military government or the civilian leadership of Myanmar responsible for the killing and mistreatment of the Rohingya refugees over the last 12 months. So it's up to countries like the United States and our allies, Canada, Europe, Japan, Australia, the natural leaders of the institutions established to hold states and their leaders accountable for atrocity crimes in the places that I've mentioned and other places, Yemen and the Philippines in recent months. This means that we sometimes need to be frank and insistent not just with our adversaries like President Putin and the Chinese leadership but also with our friends. And such is the case with the Kosovo government in this early month, January of 2018. I helped to coordinate the U.S. campaign to recognize the independence of Kosovo back in 2006 and 2007 and 2008 under Secretary Condoleezza Rice's leadership. And we worked hard to convince much of the world, a majority of countries but not everybody, that Kosovo after what had it gone through in the ethnic cleansing of 1999 deserved to be independent, could never live under the tutelage of Serbia. And we were proud of that campaign. But I think especially those of us who are friends of Kosovo need to be telling Kosovo our leadership in Prishtina now that they need to stand firmly in support of the Kosovo Specialist Chambers. That not only served suspect of atrocities and war crimes but Kosovo Muslim Albanians suspect of war crimes need to be investigated for criminal conduct. The Trump administration and Germany, Italy, France and Britain were thus right to declare last week, January 2 weeks ago, January 4th, that an effort by Prishtina to block the court would threaten all that Kosovo has achieved over the last decade. Kosovo democracy is thus at a critical moment, especially in the wake of the tragic assassination of someone who stood for peace, the Kosovo Serb leader, Oliver Ivanovich, just 10 days ago. So I think that all of our colleagues here today who have been our leaders, all of you, in this global effort would be the first to acknowledge that the fight for justice has to continue and will continue for a very long time to come. We know that the pursuit of justice in the wake of brutal wars isn't imperative. A very good example that a lot of us worked on is the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The Balkans wars couldn't really come to an end until criminals such as Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadich and Rakko Milosevic were brought to justice. All of the former U.S. officials who've held this ambassadorial assignment, I think, worked very hard to push the Serb government to find Karadich and find Milosevic. We were lied to, I know I was, consistently at the top levels of the Serb government about where these people were, right beneath the noses of the government or perhaps being harbored by the government. Our Secretary of State was lied to by the Serb leadership in 2005 and 2006 and 2007, but justice finally prevailed because of your unstinting efforts. And I'm looking here at Clint, when I say that, and Pierre, who in our time worked so hard on this issue. And that's why President Trump now needs to declare his commitment to the cause of justice and to the responsibility of the United States to help propel justice forward. His first 12 months in office have not been, in my view, encouraging in this regard. He has been nearly silent on human rights. He's been silent on democracy. At a time when Freedom House reported last week an unparalleled assault on democracy in many parts of the world, a reduction in the number of democratic states in the world, right-wing anti-democratic populist movements trying to subvert democracy in Europe, Russia intentionally trying to undercut democratic rule in Europe, our president has been silent. And as far as I can tell, silent on the war crimes agenda, he has instead embraced autocrats such as a Filipino president who himself might in the future be investigated for atrocities. President Trump did not speak out for human rights when he was in Beijing and had the chance to do that publicly when the press urged him to do that last November. He did not criticize but actually praised, in a prominent speech, the right-wing populist government of Poland on a visit last summer. As my friend and former colleague John Belanger has written, the president's national security strategy, in John's words, gives human rights short shrift. And as John points out further in a recent blog post that he wrote with Richard Fontaine, this comes at a time when democracy is under siege. Donald Trump is the first American president since before Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who appears not to see himself as the leader of an alliance of democratic values that include justice and that includes the pursuit of the worst among us in the world. There is still plenty of time for the Trump administration to emulate its Republican, as well as its democratic predecessors, to appoint an ambassador at large for global criminal justice, to speak out in support of the tribunals. And that includes when it is in our national interest to support the International Criminal Court, and importantly to make sure that we are funding and asking other countries to fund these critical institutions. There's so much injustice in the world today, in Syria, in Myanmar, in South Sudan, and that is why the legacy of the United States as the leading proponent of the many war crimes tribunals in the world today is one worthy of being honored and of course of being continued. There's only one way forward, and that is with the United States unambiguously in the lead on this issue. As all of you have been for so many decades, I salute all of you who have done such great work on behalf of our country. Thank you. Nick has agreed to take a few minutes of questions before we move on to the ambassador's panel, so I want to encourage any particular questions or short comments. And since we're professors, we'll just call on people. I'll share with us some of your memories when you were ambassador to NATO, particularly on the issue of pursuing persons indicted for war crimes, because I think you would call an issue there was some resistance. And then it ultimately shifted, so you could just elaborate for us a bit. Well, Pierre, thank you very much, and it's kind of ironic that I'm going to answer questions. I should be asking the questions of you, because the collective knowledge here dwarfs my own on this issue. But Pierre and I worked together, Clint as well, during the George W. Bush administration, and our major problem, Pierre at NATO when I was ambassador there, was trying to deal with this bitter legacy of the Bosnia war and the Kosovo war. And trying to deal with a Serb government that was still in the grip of Serb expansionism had not yet given up the dream of a greater Serbia, even in 2002, three, four, and five. And of course, after Dayton, it became an imperative to find the authors of the Srebrenica massacre and the other massacres that had taken place in the name of the Serb people. And Secretary Rice, and you, and Clint, and myself, were trying to push the Serb government to find Kardic and Milatać. I visited Serbia, I think, three times as undersecretary state after. I was in NATO. And I know the prime minister and foreign minister did not tell me the truth about what their government was doing to pay pensions to these people and to have parts of the government actually organize places where these people could hide from justice. At NATO, we had a variation of the same thing. You know, it's a big alliance. 27 members of the alliance at that time, 29 now. Not every country agreed that we should be pursuing war criminals. Live and let live. Don't go back and unearth that ugly history of the past. I could name a few governments. I probably shouldn't. I want NATO to stay together. But certainly the United States believed, the United Kingdom believed that we had to pursue the war criminals wherever they were, that NATO had to use its moral authority and, frankly, its intelligence capacity to help find those people and bring them to justice. And we had a very difficult time convincing some of the other West European allies that this should be a priority of the NATO alliance. And that was a painful experience for all of us who love and admire NATO, but wanted it to be better than it was at that moment. So it was a frustrating time to have to pursue that. But I do credit both Secretary Colin Powell and Secretary Condoleezza Rice for staying in the course. They never gave up on this. And kudos to them for that. Thank you. Well, Nick, you've pointed out that even before we get to the question of prosecution of war criminals, is the question of whether there should be intervention by the United States or other major powers to stop ongoing atrocities. And that raises both legal and political questions about forcible humanitarian intervention. Could you give us some sense of when you think that kind of outside military intervention is useful when it's not? Obviously, in Kosovo it was positive. Libya, you may argue, pro and con. So under what circumstances should the United States be prepared to use its military might to end atrocities? Yeah, and you know, this would be a great article for someone to take up if you think about the collective wisdom in this room and reflect back to the interventions we made and those we chose not to make. And then listen to some of the people. I mentioned Secretary Albright and President Clinton have both said publicly on multiple occasions, and I've heard Secretary Albright say this personally. She deeply regrets where we didn't intervene. On the other hand, I can certainly say former Foreign Service officer serving in the George W. Bush administration, I deeply regret our intervention in Iraq in March 2003. I deeply regret my support for it. I was Ambassador to NATO at the time. So I think all of us have to have some degree of humility, Mike, in approaching this key question. It's so difficult in real time when you're in the middle of a hurricane to make the right calls because there's so many different factors that go into it. But to begin to answer your question, but I really think it'd be good to encourage us all to think about this and the smarter people in the room, not me, to write about it, when the injustice or threat is absolutely clear and undeniable. That would be Rwanda, April, May, June of 1994, when it's undeniable. When we have the capacity to do something about it, which France, Belgium and the United States clearly did in April, June, May, June, July of 1994, when we can do so in such a way that doesn't cause greater harm in the process. You don't want to open up a wider pool of suffering. You don't want to widen a war or intensify it. When we know we have international law on our side, or at least a policy like responsibility or standard to protect, that would give some legitimacy to our efforts. Sometimes I think we were right to act in Kosovo by not going to the United Nations for authorization in April, May, June of 1999. I think the threat was so clear and we'd learned so many lessons from Bosnia that we were late. I think that generation, the Bill Clinton, Jacques Chirac, my bi-Kosovo Tony Blair had decided that they had to be quicker this time than we were in Bosnia. And to have the moral courage to take the criticism that you're going to take when you intervene in someone else's country. It's just an attempt to think through what would be the factors that you'd have to check off and say you can have some confidence in before you devised anyone like us, the Secretary of State or a President to undertake this type of action. The recent example I give you, Mike, would be Syria. But not Syria right now. Syria in 2012, 13 into 2014. A country in crisis, an outright civil war, the U.N. figure data that I put forth is undeniable. There were 22.4 million people in the country seven years ago today when the war was beginning to break out in Syria. And more than 12 million homeless, 7 million inside the country, 5 million outside the country. We had the military capacity before the Russian intervention in September, October 2015, before the Great Exodus to go into the northern part of the country and the eastern part of the country to establish no flight zones. We had the military capacity to do it. There was a vacuum of power in Syria. We would have overwhelmed the power of any other group in establishing that no flight zone. We could have worked with the NGO and humanitarian community to set up places where the refugees could flee. Millions of people were moving in those years. From one part of Syria to the next. The majority of people were actually inside the country homeless. They'd been blasted out of their homes by the Assad regime, by Ijabbat al-Nusra, by an emerging and Egyptian-Islamic state. And we failed to take the opportunity to do that. I know there were people, senior officials of the Obama administration who wanted the president to do it. I think with the benefit of hindsight, I don't want to sit in judgment of President Obama whom I deeply admire. And a lot of this is hindsight, looking back. But we learned the lessons. We should have gone into Syria. We could have saved a lot of lives. We could have intimidated the Assad government from using its air power. We could have bombed the airfields in an intensive way and taken away his air force. That wouldn't have ended the Civil War. It wouldn't have ended all killing. But when you have a situation where more than half the country is homeless, I think that begins to meet the standard that I just outlined. But it requires a lot of further thought and conversation. I'd be happy to have your views on it as well. Let me just seize the microphone for a minute. In all seriousness, you asked a question that we should write about all of this. And I just want to say that a former graduate of my law school, Northwestern law, where I teach Angela Walker is in the office and we actually spent a lot of time co-authoring a book chapter answering your question. And it comes out imminently. So I'll email it to you. Let's see. I think we have time for maybe one or two more questions. I'll see issues. Yes, way in the back there. Ambassador, thank you. Thank you for your service and also for your candor today. Very much appreciate it. As you know, recently the International Criminal Court has been contemplating as a result of Fattuban Suda's request to the court pursuing cases potentially against the CIA and the United States military for their involvement in war crimes in Afghanistan. There are others of course who are implicated, the Taliban, Afghan forces. I'm wondering what you might say now, given where we stand today as a country, as a leader of the Western world, what should our response be as a country to that investigation or potential investigation? Thank you very much. And that's a difficult question. I'm not trying to punt it, but I've been out of government for a number of years and so just don't have the granular sense of what has happened in Afghanistan to espouse a position in my cell and to answer your question. But just I couldn't say a few things. Obviously we have to hold ourselves accountable. That's what we had to do after Abu Ghraib. That's what we should still be doing, given the continuation of Guantanamo. When we did torture, first term in the Bush administration, we had to overcome that in the second term of the Bush administration. And I credit my good friend John Belinger, I don't know if he's in the room, but he stood up when it counted on the torture issue. In my judgment on the right side of that issue, in the second term of President Bush, when he was State Department legal advisor, and we had to fight that fight inside our own government. So of course we hold ourselves accountable. That distinguishes us from the Russians and the Chinese and the Iranians who never hold themselves accountable for their actions because we're a democratic society. And so if there's evidence that American forces or American personnel have acted improperly or have contributed to atrocities, they must be pursued. And I think the institution that feels that most deeply is the United States military. They police themselves in many ways. That's my experience working with them. But I simply don't know enough about what the specific charge that's been leveled to have to speak about it, and certainly not to have a judgment about it. I will say this, I visited Afghanistan a number of times. I've seen our troops in the field when we went in in the first decade. So some time ago. And I try to read and keep up to date with American foreign policy in Afghanistan. I'm not aware of any widespread pattern of American military actions that would amount to war crimes or atrocities. Does that say that we've not made mistakes? No. And the military has admitted, particularly in some of the bombings that we've sometimes bombed civilian populations and have had to apologize afterwards, do after action reports, try to prevent it from occurring in the future. But I'm just not aware of any systematic, continued atrocities that would warrant a charge of war crimes against the United States. If there's someone else who's much better informed, probably a lot of people, I would be happy to hear from them. But that would be my attempt to answer your question. Can I ask the first panel to convene? That would be the former ambassadors at large, and John Bellinger, whose face I just have not yet seen in the audience. So there he is. Okay, great. He's way back there. All right. John Bellinger will be our moderator. So if you could come all on up, that would be tremendous. Okay. Since we're on a tight time schedule and I want to get to our former ambassadors, I'm going to dive right in. That doesn't mean people in the back shouldn't keep getting their coffee. It's wonderful. I was sitting in the back because the room is standing room only, and it is just wonderful to see a crowd of people interested in these issues. For those of you who saw the early flyers, you may know I am pinch-hitting. I am a pale substitute for John Chatek, who has the flu and who was going to moderate this panel. But this gives me really a tremendous privilege to moderate a panel of five individuals for whom I have just the greatest, greatest respect. In fact, honestly, many people in this room have moderated lots of panels. I honestly can say I don't think I have been on a panel with five people who I admire more. These are incredibly dedicated public servants who have achieved really often against all odds, both internationally and for those of us who have served in the U.S. government against the odds, internally, enormous results. So I want to just really start with a thank you for the work that all of you have done. I can't help but say that it is probably not lost on anyone in the room, or at least half the people in the room, that all five of our former ambassadors are men. I say this as the father of two daughters, and as someone who worked for a woman as Secretary of State, who often looked out for our office, the legal advisor's office, which was 50 percent men and women. I think one day we will have an ambassador as a woman, but what we all know is that the people who really ran the office were some of the most dedicated women who were deputies in the office. I know when it worked with all of them, they're going to be on a panel later, and I really want to just shout out the work that they did, even though we are going to be interviewing the ambassadors now. I also have to say it is a huge honor to follow my colleague, Nick Burns, with whom I worked very closely for our three and a half years in government. Nick's and my, one of our very first challenges, and I am not here to tell war stories, was in fact as we tried to pivot away from a policy of more hostility towards the ICC in the first term, towards a policy of more constructive engagement in the second term. One of Nick's and my very first efforts in that regard was to support Secretary Rice's effort to persuade the President to abstain on UN Security Council 1593, which referred the situation in Darfur to the ICC. It was not easy. There were the voices in the United States government who were more hostile towards the ICC than they were concerned about Sudan. But at least as Secretary Rice said to me and Nick, ultimately the President made that decision himself and said, I am more concerned about Sudan. I will deal with any concerns that I have about the ICC later. Nick and I worked on the Security Council resolution and I saw him in action. So Nick, thank you for those efforts. Many of you know the War Crimes Office and the Legal Advisors Office worked very closely together, probably more closely together than sometimes you all would have liked. But the issues, of course, are legal issues often inextricably intertwined. Pierre and Clint and I were often joined at the hip on numerous issues and then poor Todd Buckwald. So Pierre and I were joined at the hip. Poor Todd had to work with me for all four years. But it was one of the things that we worked on most closely together was in fact the reorientation of the U.S. approach to the ICC. Todd has suffered through my giving numerous speeches on the subject. And I have often said, although the Legal Advisors Office is filled with some of the most talented lawyers in the U.S. government, if I were ever in a foxhole and were forced to pick only one lawyer to be with me in the foxhole, it would be Todd. So I was delighted when he took this job on at the end. So many of us who follow international justice issues have been concerned about the future of the office and more generally about U.S. efforts to fight for global criminal justice, especially at a time of growing authoritarianism not only abroad, but at home. And many of us in the room feel that the U.S. is losing its moral authority in the world. It's unclear what the Trump administration and Secretary Tillerson have planned for the office. As I understand it, there will be a new ambassador, but we don't know what resources that person will have or what backing that person will have from the administration and from Secretary Tillerson or even where the office is ultimately going to be placed. There are rumors, and maybe some of you all know, but that's obviously going to be very important. So this morning we're going to look both backwards, but I want to not just look backwards, but we are looking back at 20 years of the office, so we're going to spend some time on history. What I want to do is start with a lightning round, and I have warned our ambassadors that I mean lightning round so that we don't just sort of go 10 minutes at a time down each one, but about a minute down the panel with each one just looking back on what their accomplishments were when they were heading the office of which they were most proud just so we can get everybody into the conversation. Then I'm going to spend a little bit of time with each of them drilling down into some of those issues and assuming that they are crisp about those so that we don't spend all of our time looking backwards. I would like to end with some of the current issues facing the United States, global criminal justice, and then some advice for the incoming ambassador assuming that that person will be coming on board soon. You have all of our ambassadors a bio, so I am not going to go into any length other than about a sentence on each one. David Sheffer, as you know, was the first ambassador now, Mayor Brown, Robert Hellman, professor of law and director of the Center for International Human Rights at Northwestern University. Pierre Prosper worked with David and then succeeded him, and I worked closely with Pierre and he headed the office in the first term and into the first year of the Bush administration and had previously been a war crimes prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and formerly a federal prosecutor. Clint succeeded. Pierre is now distinguished professor of practice at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University and head of the McCain Institute's Global Rule of Law Governance and Security Program here in Washington, also currently president of the Birch Co-Arbitration Panel and Clint had also worked on the Coast of O Tribunal long list. Stephen Rapp headed the office for longer than anybody from 2009 to 2015 and had previously been the prosecutor for the Special Court for Sierra Leone and before that as a senior trial attorney for the ICTR. And finally, Todd served as special coordinator for the office starting in 2015 and through half of the first year of the Trump administration and all of us were very pleased that although Todd did not have a Senate confirmed position he was conferred the rank of ambassador by President Obama in July 2016 so that he held that title as well. So with that I am going to sit down and going to start going down the panel this way gentlemen about one to two minutes just on what was the accomplishment when you headed the office of which you were most proud? I'm going to be very brief. Two accomplishments. The first would be frankly one day December 31st, 2000 when I signed the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court on behalf of the United States of America as the direction of President Bill Clinton and it was the culmination of eight years of work on that court and I had achieved my objective with the hope that ultimately we would become a ratified party to the court but it certainly was the moment of my career and it was a snowbound day. I was in hiking boots. New York had been shut down with a snow blizzard. I got there on the Amtrak train at the last moment. They opened up the UN on a Sunday for me to sign and it was an extraordinary moment and I was very proud of that moment. And then secondly during the Kosovo conflict in 1999 the State Department and the Pentagon actually vested in the office of war crimes issues and its ambassador the authority to on a daily basis collect and amplify to the world both publicly and diplomatically the extent of the atrocities occurring in Kosovo as the military campaign was underway because it was felt that it was extremely important for the world to know why are we doing this? Well it's because of atrocity crimes. It's pure and simple. Nothing more than that. And so every day with the cooperation of the Pentagon every single day in the Central Intelligence Agency in our INR Bureau we collected that data and we put it forward and we pressed forward with it. And I'll just conclude by saying on the day that I stood at the State Department lobby in front of the television cameras when Slobanan Milosevic was indicted by the Yugoslav war crimes to be known in late May 1999 I had tremendous pride in saying yes, justice to not just peace but justice to. Justice can be pursued along with peace but this is an individual who merits an indictment and we have no inhibition in telling the Yugoslav tribunal that they should charge full speed ahead on the indictment of Slobanan Milosevic even while we were trying to negotiate a peace deal with him. Thank you, John. And David, thank you for organizing this event. I think it's real timely and important and it's good for us to look back at some of the accomplishments and things that perhaps we could even have done better. But from my perspective I'll be brief as well but there are really three issues that I would consider accomplishments. One is the apprehension of war criminals, Pifwix. And Mike was telling me it's in terms of not used anymore. But Pifwix, when I came into the office Yugoslavia had only about a dozen or so people in custody and Rwanda had in the area of 20. And with real concerted effort and diplomacy working with Nick at NATO we began to put pressure both on our allies so that S4 would begin to seek and apprehend these individuals and we began to put pressure on the former Yugoslavian states. We also in Africa we put pressure on the Congolese and other Angolans and other people. So by the time that at least I left the office we were able to bring in close to 60 war criminals from the former Yugoslavia to the Hague with the hardcore diplomacy working with the intelligence community using economic tools, military tools. And with Rwanda we were able to bring roughly 25 to 30 persons in custody as well. So I think it really sent the message that the accountability that David started in his term was now real and had teeth and people were at risk of being apprehended. And one other thing at John, you'll remember this with Charles Taylor. That was very, very significant. We put a lot of pressure to get Charles Taylor out of Liberia and ultimately into Stephen Raps hands for prosecution to the point where President Bush even launched an aircraft carrier and put it off the coast of Liberia and basically send a message to Taylor, you know, leave or we'll make you leave. Secondly is the transition from international justice to domestic. At the time everyone was only looking at the prosecution for these issues at the international level and we began to really put pressure and let states know that they had a responsibility as well. The third thing is Darfur. Darfur at the time the atrocities were happening, the international community was doing nothing, refused to call it a genocide from the UN on down. We borrowed a page out of Dave's book from Kosovo and sent a team to Sudan and Chad and interviewed refugees internally displaced persons, wrote a report, Secretary Powell at the direction of the president and working with the national security advisor John. We all looked at this, determined it was a genocide and then invoked the genocide convention, went to the UN and called for an investigation which actually led to where we are today and its availability for prosecution. But I'll stop there and we can talk more later. I just want to cite two things which actually are a progression of what David and Pierre have mentioned and also going back to John what you and Nick mentioned earlier. The first and I think which was a huge advance was trying to undo some of the damage that had been done in the first term of the Bush administration, policies driven by John Bolton and others which really was a scorched earth policy toward the ICC and toward international justice writ large. When Secretary Rice asked me to become ambassador this was one of the issues she cited right at the outset saying I want you to work hard to try to put us back into good standing on these things and to get us back in lock step with countries with whom we share values. So there was a lot of work that went into this. Trying to develop cooperation with the ICC, institutional support, working with the prosecutor and I spent a lot of time engaging partners in Europe and elsewhere trying to convince them that we were shifting our views on this, that we were moving in the right direction. More broadly than just the ICC also trying to bring civil society groups and others on board. I started doing monthly meetings with international human rights organizations really established a working group just to get their thoughts on what was going on in the world. Trying to have us again as Secretary Rice had said mooring lock step with our partners and I think over time we were very successful in this way. We laid the groundwork that allowed for a more institutionalized approach in the Obama administration in terms of the relationship with the ICC and I think we got to a good point. We moved past just being able to abstain on UN Security Council resolutions and actually vote affirmatively in favor of what the ICC was doing and as I said this was a step in the right direction. The other thing continuing on Nick's point in Pierre's was advancing accountability in the former Yugoslavia. Pierre made during his time huge progress on arrests of fugitives from the ICTY by the end of my tenure there were only two that were still remaining at large and so we were able to get Rodovan Karadzic and others. During Steve's tenure they got Rodko Mladic and Gauderan Hajic the last two. But this did really take a sustained effort with the Serbian government and also with our allies as Nick mentioned earlier trying to keep them on board. The Dutch were very firm on conditionality for Serbia but they were about the only ones in Europe that were still retaining that strong position. And so I spent a lot of time trying to bolster the Dutch and working with our allies there. And then finally in that regard was also trying to strengthen domestic prosecution capabilities in Yugoslavia for the point when ICTY closed to make sure that there wasn't an impunity gap and we launched a process for cross-border cooperation. We were able to get agreements between Serbia, Croatia and Montenegro and then Stephen during his tenure brought the process to closure with the final agreement with Bosnia. So I'll leave it there. There are two developments that I'd like to mention. The first was the surrender of two persons wanted by the International Criminal Court for crimes in the Congo, Bosco and Degonda for crimes in Uganda, Dominic, Angwin, two U.S. authorities. And the transfer of those individuals through U.S. transport including a 1,000 kilometer flight on U.S. military aircraft to the point where they could be surrendered to the ICC. This represented I think the culmination of this strategy of really positive engagement that began in the second Bush administration with the ICC. And this last year I've been on multiple platforms with Fatou Ben-Soudou who cites the current prosecutor of the ICC the fact that there are now four people in custody and in trial at the ICC and half of them were delivered to the ICC by a non-party the United States of America. This also is very related of course to this PIFWIC issue that Pierre had talked about and that Clint mentioned again that these fugitives and to of course the office's own involvement with the war crimes rewards program which we administer and then get approval through an interagency committee. We spearheaded the effort to change the statute beginning in 2011 picking up bipartisan support in Congress in 2012 and 2013 legislation was signed after unanimous support in both houses by President Obama that allowed us to then designate ICC fugitives for U.S. rewards. Some say where the office focuses too much on these things but I tell you I mean one in terms of the people that are demanding justice the mothers are sure ever needs are the victims of Charles Taylor's crimes the victims of the crimes of the LRA or Bosco and Uganda the terminator of the Congo that getting these individuals to justice to face their victims is essential but it also sends that important message to the future to people that may be considering the commission of these crimes that their day could come to and if we weaken that effort I mean every time a Bashir travels or others travel and there's no answer to that that I think reduces our ability to prevent mass atrocities. The second relates to strengthening our ability both domestically and globally to investigate and document these crimes as they're as they're happening as a one who's prosecuted these crimes and one who's worked with the prosecutors and all of these courts it's often difficult to tie the atrocity that everybody knows about to the high level actor and there needs to be more effort to develop the evidence real time. This is particularly challenging of course as the major courts are closing the ad hoc tribunals and as the UN Security Council that we relied on in the past for them even for ICC referrals is blocked so I find myself often going to Geneva more than the Hague as through the Human Rights Council we found it possible to get inquiries for Syria, North Korea, Sri Lanka, South Sudan and most recently Yemen where the Security Council was frankly blocked but these inquiries don't do enough they get you a 23 page report every six months and so in 2012 we began to push for real time documentation and the launch of the ESJAC initiative by Secretary Clinton at the Istanbul Friends of the Syria people meeting was a sort of the first step in that effort to develop this real time evidence that led on to SEJA and other groups that have collected hundreds of thousands of pages of documents to work with Caesar who brought up 50,000 photos of people tortured in government custody and most recently to the establishment by the UN General Assembly around the blockage of the Security Council of a mechanism to build dossiers for national and eventually for international prosecutions to the crimes in Syria. A very brief war story with Charles Taylor where Charles Taylor was captured and denied the situation. The question is where he could be tried. Very few people in custody at that point had empty courtrooms and was available but they did not want to ask us for fear that we would slap them down and we made the decision internally that as part of this pivot, Nick you were there that we were not allergic to the ICC as the ICC and we very much supported the trial for Charles Taylor so having made the decision that we thought that he could actually be tried at the ICC but by the special court for Sierra Leone that we would try him in the Hague and it fell to me to call up the president of the court who was really very surprised and said this is a surprising telephone call but certainly most welcome. So that was part of the pivot. Todd, you probably helped write my talking points. But I do remember getting surprising phone calls. I actually find it sort of a hard question to answer because there's so much that happens that has good but sort of bad alloyed with it and there's a lot of two steps forward, one step back phenomenon and you can question yourself whether in fact you're gaining. It's also hard for me because I had a whole life in L supporting all these people, I imagine being lawyers to these people supporting them which generated lots of problems that are sort of mixed in with the moments when I was there. I would say I remember very well and in a way of course it wasn't when I was ambassador but 1593 was just a phenomenal moment and I remember spending most of that day up in your office with just like a thousand things sort of happening that you couldn't imagine would be if you haven't sat in Nick Burns' office how many things you sort of have to keep sort of going and juggling and keeping together to make a decision like that carry forward and when Bosco and Taganda turned himself in to the embassy in Kigali I think the way the State Department found out about it was the person I believe was the DCM at the time who I knew from other work in the State Department called me at home at four o'clock in the morning the off center calls up and Bosco and Taganda just turned himself in at the embassy in Kigali and, you know, do you have the wrong number? What? And it was and it set off sort of this exhilarating week of sort of details and of course I hadn't turned it in I'm just sort of like a bureaucrat sort of trying to sort of figure out how to sort of process the thing forward so that it can end up at the Hague but the adrenaline level is so high because such an important thing is happening and in some way you're facilitating it as other highlights it's sort of a defensive highlight but I would say that having the it's my inside baseball world having the aggression debate end up in a place where it's not going to knock the U.S. relationship with the ITC off its course is maybe partly because I put so much effort into it working with John and working with Harold that, with Harold Coe afterwards and it just seemed to me such a almost more surprising than some phone calls I would get from John I think we've landed in a place where that won't where that isn't sort of a fatal blow to the relationship and I think it's good for the United States and honestly, honestly, honestly, I think it's really good for the ICC even though I know a lot of my colleagues who work on ICC issues overseas have a very different view about it I just think it's fundamental On the non-ICC side, more of what the office does I would point to the birth I see David Mandel Anthony over there, the birth of the birth of the special criminal court in the Central African Republic both because, which is not unalloyed either there's good and bad, there's lots of difficulties it's unclear what will end up happening but it's sort of emblematic of a development which I think is the future path towards success in this area which is honestly sort of away from sort of solving everything with big or towards finding localized solutions that are for tailored to local circumstances and as importantly are more affordable because I think that the vital function in pushing this issue forward and putting it on the permanent agenda but they're not replicable we just can't afford things like that, it just won't happen we won't be able to summon the resources for it so we have to find other solutions for that kind of thing and I would say also in terms of personal satisfaction the determinations by both Secretary Kerry and Secretary Tillerson of Genocide in North Iraq just because our office put so much effort into that and in a way it's a word it's a word but the so many people came into my office afterwards to see how much it meant to them and how vindicated they were by the fact that the United States in this way was sort of standing by them but I think it was a very important development and then on a sort of organizational level I think just sort of keeping the office together in a period where it wasn't obvious what was going to happen and the when I came in I said it was my goal the office had a meeting but our goals the last year was to have the office land in a good place so that the people who come afterwards will understand the importance of it and it was shaky for a while nobody quite knew what was going to happen but Secretary Tillerson has there's a commitment now on behalf of the administration to keep the office and I think that is a recognition of something that's very important which is underneath all this people have different views on the ICC on how to handle specific situations but underneath everything the work in the fiber of the American body politic is a feeling that people who commit these kinds of atrocities and it can get knocked off its course from time to time and other things can interfere with it but it's there and it won't it can get knocked off center stage but it can't go away and I think that is the forces that make that true are the reasons that there'll be an office and hopefully some ambassador at large so thank you all of you all I wanted to get a quick overview of the breadth of the things that the office does both the terms of continuity and the different issues I would love to drill down on every single one of these issues but I'm not going to be able to because I do at the end want to actually ask a couple of broader questions for everybody and then get to your questions so what I'm going to do for about the next 15 minutes is interview very briefly each of the ambassadors on just a couple of these things even though I'd like to go deeper and since you've got colleagues down the line continue to be crisp if you all would and I may actually have to cut you off just to make sure that we get everybody and I do want to get to the ICC at the end actually to the question that was asked in the back of sort of how does the US deal with the fact that the US itself is under threat but David you said your proudest moment was signing the Rome Statute but at the same time sadly it was a failure in some ways which you really would have liked to have had was the US vote in favor and have a statue that we were comfortable with you've written about this in your book how could the US have handled this differently the negotiations or were they things that were really just out of our hands once you have a multilateral negotiation I think it's absolutely critical there are many in the room who were with me during this journey in the 1930's 1990's and for a while you all look very good for you I would just say that I thought a real pivotal point that kind of sealed the coffin on us at Rome which then allowed us not to be able to vote at Rome in favor of the Rome Statute but only work for two years thereafter and finally get to assigning of the Statute but the critical moment globally was in Rome that's when the world was watching us very very closely and our leadership was on the line in Rome in 1998 and I think to do it differently I would have would have hoped and I guess I don't know how I could have fought harder but somehow fought harder in the two or three months prior to Rome to get a revised set of instructions from the US government on what I could negotiate in Rome we had resistance from the Pentagon in terms of being able to go to Rome with a proposal that I thought and Secretary Albright thought could unwedge the situation and put us in a much much better position with respect to our view of the final terms of the Statute and its jurisdictional reach we had gone in there leading from the very first moment at Rome leading with that kind of proposal it could have been a game changer and we argued for that very very strongly in the councils of government but caution overtook the exercise in other quarters so there was that critical issue and I think the other thing I would have changed a little bit if I had the ability would have been during those two years of 1999 and 2000 a more vigorous display by the totality of the executive branch in our good faith effort to rejoin the talks which we did to work through some modifications some issues in the rules of evidence and procedure and elements of crimes that would make us feel much more comfortable with the court which ultimately we did and we signed but it was a very very hard trail and I need the voices of many others behind me not just me I need many other voices behind me from the federal government to impress the rest of the world that the United States is truly on deck as a leader in that venture I'm not going to address post my administration unless you want me to we'll get back to that shifting gears although to another really difficult situation cover of your book all the missing souls walking through a cemetery that of course was a wrench what are you sorry what do you think the lessons are for today we certainly could have handled Rwanda differently but I will just put forward a cautionary point about about making that position clear it truly was not that obvious prior to early March 1994 that in fact genocide would commence in early March 1994 yes we knew there were problems we knew that issues had arisen in Rwanda but it wasn't as if we were in a position at that point to know that we had to be prepared to prevent a genocide in early March 1994 we learned a lot of lessons from that including how we better understand intelligence that is coming from such experts as I know Jim Finkel is in the room and Michael Marin that kind of information coming to us needs to be understood and read with far greater perspective than we were doing at the time we were not focusing as we should have at the time on that information but at the same time it wasn't a clear predictor nonetheless when it started there should have been alarm bells going off within the US government and the Clinton administration and those alarm bells really actually were not going off and I think what we tried to learn from that experience is that the moment starts and you know what it looks like you know what it looks like when it starts and you should not be naive about it and you should not say that other priorities are taking precedence at that very moment I'll never forget this we were it was the day that we were trying to get everyone out of the US Embassy in Kigali in the first couple of days of the genocide and the whole focus was getting everyone out of Rwanda and I was sitting in the sit room as a deputy on the deputies committee and what did we do that whole day we were dealing with the Bosnian conflict that whole day and it was an afterthought at the end someone sort of burped up oh yes and about those Americans leaving Rwanda let's make sure that we've got all of that set in place no one said anything about atrocity crimes or anything going on to the people of Rwanda on that day it was all about Americans out of the embassy understandable but you have to be smarter than that when those things happen and you have to get on top of them much much faster so I need to turn to Pierre Pierre you had a remarkably close relationship with Secretary Powell a great man but at the same time you had to spend four and a half years of your tenure with two millstones around your neck one was the so-called unsigning dispute and then the other was having to deal with Guantanamo and all of the detainees so I want to ask you about I think we'll put Guantanamo aside but I do want to pursue the Rome Statue and I want to talk to you about some of the other work that you did at the same time so the president did authorize John Bolton to tell the United Nations that we did not intend to become a party which to a certain extent was already clear because we had signed but it already said we were not but it did result in a two-year period of sort of a deep freeze between us and the ICC one of the things that always interested me and I thought you might talk about a little bit was the speech that Mark Grossman actually gave announcing the U.S. government's decision to that we were not going to become party was actually a very conciliatory let's work together speech you and I both worked on it and that was the president's reflected the president's decision but that speech was then overtaken by a very hostile period including the negotiation of the article 98 agreement so just talk about your experience having to be war crimes ambassador at that period of time and then we'll turn to something more positive well I mean you can imagine the you know the challenges when you walk into a country you say you need to turn over you know this person but then you know when the conversation shifted to the ICC or we walk in and say and by the way can you sign this article 98 agreement it was very very difficult but you know I think you know one of the things that we tried to do it in a way there were some good things with the opposition to the ICC and I'll tell you what it is we began to push the idea as part of our philosophy that the unsigning if you will was not just about the issue of the politicization and going after Americans but we also shifted the conversation to discuss the idea of we have to look at a domestic process first now David did a remarkable job in negotiating the complementarity provision but the tone in the international community at the time was that was kind of off the side really it was almost subject matter jurisdiction that if there are war crimes genocide crimes that you may be committed it automatically goes to the ICC so we began to shift the conversation and reinforce the complementarity issue and began to look at domestic processes not only from the perspective of whether the ICC would come in and basically cherry pick and we can have a whole conversation on this issue but also the issue that I would talk about a lot was the abdication of responsibility by the states themselves because a lot of states decided at the time well if there's a conflict there's atrocities we're not going to touch it it goes straight to the ICC a great example of that is Uganda and dealing with the LRA and the abuses there so it was a fascinating time dealing dealing with that issue but it had its challenges both internally and and externally but I think we were able to to progress so I'll let you sort of pick amongst the several things other things that you were able to because you really did move the office forward I'm interested but you could pick a different one if you wanted your work Pierre and you alluded to this to why on international justice as the only answer it really should be a complementary approach and I know you worked on that but I'd be interested in your speaking about that or if you wanted to talk in the context of a particular tribunal please do well with the domestic process really it began with David when we were working on Sierra Leone and it was at that time I guess it would be 99 2000 the real motivation is kind of what Todd alluded to is we were looking at these budgets coming out of Yugoslavia and Rwanda that were at that time enormous now they pale in comparison to what they end up being and we began to look at the issue of we have to do something better we also began to look at the idea that we need to get the locals involved because in the end the justice was not felt at the grassroots level people were watching foreigners literally prosecuting on their behalf and they had the ability to accept or reject the outcome so we really began the philosophy really began there where we started with this hybrid tribunal for Sierra Leone David sent me to Sierra Leone and then to the UN the resolution but we carried that through into the Bush administration for multiple reasons one we believed in it but also reinforced our arguments on the ICC and we tried to show that there is another way of doing these things so I think that was key and then that led to creating the local courts in Bosnia and Serbia and elsewhere which ultimately led to Lebanon and all these other places so I think it really set the tone and began to place responsibility back to where it belongs that's not to say there's not a need for international tribunals but in the first instance states should have the responsibility great, thanks Pierre so Clint you referred to the pivot in the second term which made your life a little bit easier I remember a number of conversations where we both talked about the amount of time that you had to spend on returning Guantanamo DT&Es which I know was not your favorite job other than that we were getting rid of them but having to negotiate the returns to different countries is not really what the war crimes ambassador had signed up to do but again talk about some of the other tribunals that you worked on in Cambodia and then we had this odd tribunal that Pierre just mentioned the special court for Lebanon which is a hybrid in a number of different ways yeah I mean we we continued work on all of these institutions which which David and Pierre had laid the groundwork for so the Sierra Leone court worked very close with them and Stephen during his time as prosecutor there the Cambodia court which was caught up in very difficult negotiations right at the outset trying to get it started and we tried to engage in that and move the process along and it has still been a very slow slow process as David can attest to both of us subsequently worked as special envoys for the secretary general of the UN to try to assist the Cambodia court and it still has its challenges even today the special tribunal for Lebanon was it's a little bit of an outlier it is not a atrocity crimes court it really was set up to deal with one crime and this was the assassination of Syrian I'm sorry Lebanese prime minister Hariri and so there was a lot of pressure France was a huge advocate for this and to be quite frank I think there was more of a political agenda behind this than there was with some of these other institutions it's impossible to separate politics and international justice out completely as much as we might try to do that but I think with the Lebanon tribunal there was an effort to use this as a bit of a tool trying to bring some stability to Lebanon and the belief that Syria was very much involved in this bringing it as a tool to get the Syrians out of Lebanon or at least to diminish their influence there I got pulled into this largely at the request of the UN because of experience in negotiating these things and just trying to figure out what we would be looking for with a host state agreement with the Netherlands and so in effect I became a bit of a mediator between the UN and the Dutch government on this and the Dutch were already very experienced in this obviously with their record of hosting tribunals so we were able to take this forward looking back I'm not sure that this was a good idea I had some misgivings at the time but I think the energy, the resources that have gone into this institution probably are not consistent with what the needs were for this crime so Steven let me talk first about the ICC and your continuation sort of the pivot and the Bush administration's second term to improve the relationship with the ICC and I'd be interested some people in this room know but others really probably don't fully know what up to the end of the Obama administration what was the relationship with the ICC in terms of support, intelligence sharing of course constrained to a certain extent by the American Service Members Protection Act what did you continue during your time in office and what at the time at least that you left and turned over to Todd really was the substance of that relationship well I think as we've talked before the relationship began to improve certainly during the second Bush administration with the withdrawal of the particularly the Nethercut amendment that required the United States to negotiate these non-surrender agreements Secretary Rice said that that was shooting ourselves in the foot and so that was knocked out and of course the United States went along with the referral of Darfur to the ICC and by 2008 as Clint will tell you was strongly opposing any kind of deferral by the UN Security Council under Article 16 but through all of that we still weren't participating we hadn't become observers which we were entitled to do because we've been at Rome and it signed the final act not the statute but essentially the minutes the Russians and the Chinese participated as observers in the assembly of states parties that it started meeting after the court was ratified in 2002 and we'd been absent the terms of specifically the definition of aggression had been negotiated in a way that when we got back into it in 2009 we could never change any of the words it had already been done what we did was make the decision soon after I came back in September came on in September of 2009 through the interagency process and it was difficult to engage with the ICC and to become an observer and I then gave the address at the ICC assembly of states parties was a great day we were still of course in the Obama effect time period when he was receiving the Nobel Prize a couple weeks later and people were just thrilled they thought the world had changed permanently but of course we gave them a strong message of support for international justice and of the commitment that the U.S. had without interrupting that sort of positive tone we also expressed concerns that we had meanwhile we worked on trying to find ways that we could assist the ICC and in that we had the benefit of Senator Dodd's amendment to the American Service Members Protection Act which said nothing herein about the United States from assisting in the case of a non-citizen who such as Slobina Milosevic Osama Bin Laden you know people like that who were wanted for genocide war crimes and crimes against humanity which some said almost swallow the statute but we got an interpretation of that from the legal counsel in the Department of Justice which sadly hasn't yet been released but we've discussed it but basically allowed the United States to assist the ICC in kind that we were also faced with a prohibition from an earlier law in 2001 that said we couldn't fund the ICC so in March of 2010 at a adjourned session of the Assembly of States Parties in New York I announced that we were prepared to assist the ICC and to engage this was also very much part to be frank of a strategy which we sold some of the harder parts of the U.S. government the DOD and the intelligence community on the fact that we were in the room and we were engaging and supportive people would be listening to us on the crime of aggression issue which was coming up at the review conference that was scheduled to occur in Kampala, Uganda over two weeks in early June of 2010 but we carried on under this sort of a rule under which we could assist and a process was developed John Kim or a great man who's since this passed away was the legal consular and he became the point person for receiving, for communicating with the ICC about things that they would want there was an internal process in which we would respond it certainly permitted us then to engage diplomatically and politically in support of particularly ICC arrests and to their engagement in various places we always hoped we could move forward into the area of information sharing but there were difficulties implementing the same kind of regime that we had under sort of rule 70 with the ad hoc tribunals that we did find some ways to share intelligence but it was particularly in the area of fugitives and that kind of thing and intelligence regarding fugitives we were able to make our most positive progress and of course at the same time as you mentioned the question it was the third question raised to Secretary Burns we did have this issue of Afghanistan from a defensive standpoint difficulty of course with ASPA in the sense that we weren't to cooperating cases involving citizens but certainly I think it did open the door for what's now been at least the ICC's disclosed the kind of discussions that we were able to conduct I'll get Todd to tell the story about aggression but very briefly Stephen there are so many things I could ask you about Central African Republic but on Syria because I know you work very hard on Syria and we don't really have a good answer on Syria but I know talk about what you try to do to lay the groundwork at least for investigations and prosecutions of war crimes by Syria well first of all just on the ICC question the possibility of a referral to the ICC had been talked about hadn't hadn't come forward because there was the sense that the Russians would veto it but it was after the Caesar photos came out and I became the sort of point person for working with Caesar in the U.S. government for having his those photos vetted by the FBI in terms of the fact that they weren't fake news that they were real photos of real people and real events that the release of those photos led the French government to finally move when Foreign Minister Fabius saw the photos we have to go to the U.N. we have to seek a Security Council referral and I was proud of the fact that the U.S. supported that referral and that we also lined up and lobbied to get the non-permanent members to vote for it so in the end we had 13 votes for it with of course the two vetoes of Russia and China that was the big picture but then meanwhile of course as I noted earlier we wanted to document these crimes real but then of course our continued support of a commission of inquiry chaired by the Brazilian jurist Paulo Pinheiro though I for one who a fan of Paulo and the work in Geneva didn't believe that that was giving us enough for the law enforcement they were reporting on the crime base they weren't giving us the kind of information that we needed to tie the links together and that was our particular initiative to establish that would work with civil society organizations and other NGOs obtained funding for them and professional training etc. so that they could really develop this evidence on the ground real-time and that was the ESJAC initiative launched by Secretary Clinton I was very surprised the day that I got a call and so what's happening to ESJAC and I said nothing and it was Victoria Newell and I said well I'm going to Istanbul with her to announce that we're supporting that it was an idea that originated in our office eventually funded by DRL led to a variety of efforts that have made actually the sort of collection of evidence in the Syrian context stronger than we had in any of these other things it's almost as strong as Nuremberg and in the case of the Caesar photo it was actually stronger and so that's been a key part of this and that's then led to our engagement with and I haven't talked about I see my friend Theresa McHenry out there from the Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Division of our Justice Department and the unit of DHS and FBI that works on cases in the United States but we became very engaged with units like those in a variety of countries that for one reason or another have jurisdiction to prosecute these crimes and even though sometimes those aren't the highest level actors we can begin to develop the effect which builds the I think the perception that there's going to be consequences and may lead eventually to fuller justice efforts Thank you. So Todd talk to us about the crime of aggression which has sort of been your baby now Steven was involved, Harold was involved there are different pieces of it you all managed to pull a rabbit out of the hat at Kampala, I don't think many of us thought going in that you were going to be able to negotiate the crime of aggression applied to the United States you were and then there was the issue of whether it would apply without people actually having signed on and I think we have a decision that came out in December so crisply where do we stand some people in the room know but some people don't on the crime of aggression who's in, who's out and why So you worked on it too because it actually started back in we started really engaging in 2007 is participating in new administration really and the need to deal with it review conference was coming up I think it stands really as an example the best commercial I've ever come across of why it's important to engage because in 2007 and then under John and then when Harold came we looked at the package that the parties had put together and honestly every American State Department Defense Department all over this can't be the definition of aggression and everybody outside thought what's wrong with this and it was just a complete disconnect partly because I guess we were out of the room and you know if you're in the room you sort of make concessions along the way you know where they came from and it just had no resonance with us where we stand today is the package that was prepared in our absence between 2009 1998 and 2009 had several features it had a definition which we don't agree with and it was it had left open some of the questions about who it would apply to in Capala in 2010 when they had their review conference we were able under Harold's leadership largely to or they were persuaded the the sponsors were persuaded to write it in a way that the jurisdiction of the court wouldn't extend to non-Rome Statute Parties so in a way it was everything that the Republic Administration had wanted which is the Rome Statutes jurisdiction shouldn't apply to Americans and it was concretized in the aggression that was the way the aggression amendments would work there was still a question about who among the Rome Statute Parties it would apply to and there was sort of a debate about how it would how it should work and the question was whether it should apply only to those who ratify the amendments or should it apply to everybody, all the Rome Statute Parties and in Capala they came up with words that were I guess had some ambiguity in it although to us we thought legal result was clear but there were two different camps about interpretations of what had been decided and one was that it applied to everybody unless you affirmatively submitted opt-out declaration you write a letter to the registrar of the ICC saying it doesn't apply to us which politically is a very hard thing to do or it would apply only to those who ratify and the issue sort of lurked for years between Capala and the I should say and the amendment was written in a way so that the court's jurisdiction wouldn't be activated for at least seven years and would require another decision by the parties to activate it which gave them an opportunity to comment on and sort of tell the world what this amendment meant and the seven years ran the parties had the at the annual meeting of states parties in December in New York a decision was made and lo and behold the decision was the decision that it would only apply to those who ratified and we're not one of the parties we were deciding and by the time this was actually decided in New York in December we weren't in the room anymore because they had decided they would do this only among the states parties which is probably a mistake on their part but I do think that over the seven years before we had created the climate in which it became both credible and I think we created an argument that in my mind was irrefutable but I think all my arguments are irrefutable but that really gave the space for this decision to happen and I do think it was I think we don't focus on it as much now as we used to and which ends up meaning that people who haven't said you ICC can exercise aggression jurisdiction over us people who haven't said that won't have the court's aggression jurisdiction applied to them so countries who ratified the amendments they've agreed to this definition the countries that haven't ratified the amendments they haven't agreed to the definition there's a certain balance and fairness in that I do think that the everything I said which my views on my view I'm not going to destroy those of the state departments so I do think that the project of extending the court's jurisdiction to aggression is totally understandable I totally get where it comes from I people I deeply respect believe it's an important thing for the court I think it's misguided I think that in fact the biggest challenge the court has in the years going forward is modulating that which it promises to that which it can deliver so that it's not constantly caught short promising things it can't deliver and it cannot deliver so it's not always going to be Christian promise it's about to have a new war crimes impact this is a real lightning round because I do want to if we can get in a couple of questions really quickly if there were a word or two of advice to the incoming ambassador what would it be and I'm going to allied into that since we in fact we've talked a lot about the ICC and we now have the ICC potentially investigating us with the risk that the Trump administration the relationship that we've been talking about back into the deep freeze if they do the wrong thing how what piece of advice would you give there and you've got to be real quick so David very quick first have the courage to bring truth to power it's a daily exercise you're just going to have to do it and you're going to have to take a lot of hard knocks and that is life you're not going to be the most popular person in the room really I'll just make a personal bid here I think the next ambassador could be extremely influential in pushing forward I think a critical piece of legislation that should be in our federal criminal code which is crimes against humanity bill which would allow our courts to fully investigate and prosecute effectively crimes against humanity there's a huge gap in our federal criminal code it's embarrassing we realize we're able to do this we're not and if we were to achieve this it would I think give us much greater comfort under what we call the complementarity principle in terms of our relationship with the international criminal court that was crisp thanks Pierre well I mean this is easier said than done but I think that the key really is for the next ambassador to have a close relationship with the secretary because I think that's where it comes down if you and the secretary are on the same page the bureaucracy will move if you're isolated or you have to go through layers to get the secretary nothing will get done the second issue is we also have to form a close relationship with all the regional bureaus I think it's important that you understand where they are coming from what their needs are and they understand what you're trying to do this only works if we all work together that's the only way we can accomplish anything because to protect civilians to pursue accountability you need all aspects of the US government to be moving in the same direction and if you're just going in there and you're fighting everyone within a bureaucracy you may feel good about yourself but nothing will get done and sometimes you can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good thank you Clint and this is an ambassador in large position and so although you're based in Washington you do spend a lot of time on the road and all of us travel a lot some more than others but you do have to go out and you're constantly on airplanes you're constantly going around the world and engaging friendly governments and not so friendly governments but I think it's also important for the next ambassador to engage effectively in the policy debate in Washington you can go out and this just builds on what Pierre was just saying of having these relationships in the department but also more broadly in the interagency I think all of us generally have the same views on a lot of these issues and you can go around the world and you can express these views but if all you're doing is expressing your personal opinion it doesn't have any impact and it actually has a negative impact of raising expectations so you have a responsibility to try to move the policy discussion in Washington and bring the policy makers here along to what you want to see done and then the second point is also about domestic diplomacy all of us also during our time in this office spent time traveling to college campuses and places around the country delivering talks I think there is more of a need for that now than there ever has been as Nick alluded to in his comments he's not really embraced the idea of human rights and democracy as being important and he's certainly not advocating for them and I think among people around the country right now there's this view that it isn't something that's important to us so as the ambassador for war crimes you have a unique platform for going out and delivering this message and so I would suggest to the ambassador that they spend time doing that and engaging the domestic constituency as well well said I agree with that well I agree with everything that's been said so far let me just say there is a necessity that the ambassador engage on behalf of our government with our allies sometimes they're allies of convenience in a particular situation and you go there and you work with them and you build the possibility of justice also with multilateral institutions including the ICC and very important to do that I know earlier in this administration there was some talk about the United States having been elected to the Human Rights Council for a three year term at a time when the Russians were defeated would refuse to take up that seat and that's not the case we're still active in Geneva pushing for on Yemen and South Sudan and on Burma and Myanmar and that's extremely important to be in the room to do that and not to turn back from these institutions because we can actually exercise enormous leadership and very much very much in our interest the other thing of course is that I think we need to put our own best foot forward in terms of what we do with accountability in the United States and this is what's so relevant on this on this Afghanistan issue I frankly and I've said publicly at the Kennedy School last year that we would after the senate report on torture that was released we needed to appoint another special consul that had done and to show the due diligence now I was recently on a forum with Eric Holder who talked about the great things that John Durham had done in his investigation and how he had turned over every rock and he had really attempted to put together cases but there weren't cases that met the standard of the United States Attorneys Manual and that's what justice requires it doesn't require that you win a case it doesn't require that you file a case it requires that you exercise that kind of due diligence to have a genuine process that's what we need to present to the ICC that's the magic bullet when it comes to avoiding ICC jurisdiction it's not making this argument which doesn't apply in the case of atrocity crimes that the ICC doesn't have jurisdiction over us it has territorial jurisdiction in every country that ratified it including Afghanistan including the places where the black sites were Poland, Lithuania, Romania they have jurisdiction over whatever crimes happened there making that argument which makes some people happy when we make that argument at least in some parts of the US government has absolutely no persuasive effect of the people that will decide the issue in the ICC who all decided that even our Canadian friends won't agree with us on that we need to say we're in complementarity the United States is doing everything through its justice system in any case that arises that's more robust than frankly anybody else's system and has given no cause for now or in the future for an international prosecutor to take a case against an American with that particular showing there is no jurisdiction in the ICC Thanks Todd's going to have the last word here David says we can do a couple of questions so please be ready to ask questions look for the microphone and as soon as Todd's done first question Todd so real briefly advice I think that the situation with Afghanistan if the prosecutor's request for international investigation is granted I think it's something that whoever succeeds us will have to it will not be easy to deal with at whoever it is and whatever the policy turns out to be in the ICC we need to keep our eye on what to me is really the bigger ball but is not unrelated which is that we have to be a strong opponent and a strong advocate for the principle which is an American principle that those who commit atrocities need to be held to people say it's not sort of emphasized there's some emphasis in it, it reverberates I mean you can see in some Secretary Taylor's statements always going to be there because it's part of our moral fiber it shows up at the congressional provisions that are coming out of the appropriations committee you can't maybe they wouldn't, maybe they would if you can't abolish the office it's all responding to the same thing which is way deep down when the people say people in America who might not say anything abstract but they will say those people, those are bad people they have to be held to account we can't run it from it, we shouldn't run from it on a more sort of organizational level I think like everybody said but what Clint said about relations with agencies in Washington and especially working to build a relationship with DOD with all the agencies that have an interest in what our policy is and then the last thing is just engage, engage, engage because I just have seen firsthand that sort of staying home, pretending it isn't happening just criticizing whatever the result is it may make people feel good but it doesn't work because the world will march on without us and we need to sort of be there even if we disagree with them and so I'm not going to let all five panelists answer, I want to do a couple of questions so I'm going to get whoever grabs the mic first and maybe one second one, Clint first then David and then we'll take the question over there I mentioned that early on about one of the things that I had done in my time as ambassador was doing a weekly I'm sorry monthly meeting working group meeting with international human rights organizations so like Amnesty Human Rights First, Human Rights Watch others bringing them together getting their inputs because you're right, I mean a lot of times they have resources that go beyond what the US government does and particularly in the security era in which we exist now it's difficult for people from embassies to get out on the ground and these people a lot, these organizations a lot of time have people in these villages you know out where crimes are occurring so I always found it very helpful to just gather them as a group on a monthly basis, get their input see what was concerning them hear their criticisms of what our policies were and a lot of times I would try to explain where we were in the policy debate inside the United States government sometimes policies that I didn't agree with entirely but just explaining to them what the difficulties were in moving policy perhaps in the direction that they wanted so I think it's absolutely critical to have that kind of dialogue I think it benefits the government to have that input and to have that sort of give and take David quickly and then here right obviously the role of civil society in the negotiations on the international criminal court was enormous and went on for years and continues to to major influence in how we interface with the international criminal court and how the court itself accomplishes its mission so civil society is very, very important there I'll just tell you in 1999 and 2000 when I chaired the atrocities prevention interagency working group I typically would spend the day as follows the morning would be with the intelligence agencies and the various bureaus of the State Department in a closed room in the State Department looking at what we thought was a prospective atrocity situation within the next six months that was the purpose of the group to try to learn from our mistakes in the past and after that I would typically bring in in the afternoon civil society now I would also have some other state people with me we would have filtered through what we had heard in the morning but then in the afternoon or was it important to hear from the people in the field from civil society sometimes who had not necessarily different perspectives but they had incredibly incredible depth in their understanding of what was occurring on the ground so that by the end of the day we could start to structure a memorandum to the undersecretary of State for political affairs Tom Pickering at that time which would encapsulate not only what the intelligence agencies and bureaus had told us but also what civil society had advised us and do one last question and unfortunately I'm going to have to cut it off there so we stay on time on domestic prosecutions you have sort of two main categories of perpetrators you have citizens who go abroad commit crimes and come back and you have foreigners who for whatever reason enter into one's territory both domestically here in the U.S. and then in terms of our engagement with European partners and others what can and should we do to strengthen our own apprehension and prosecution of perpetrators and then similarly for those countries in Europe and elsewhere why don't I get Pierre or Steven on those and you're referring to prosecution here in the U.S. that's right so we have domestic prosecution by the Department of Justice well I mean obviously if crimes have been committed whether it's genocide or war crimes crimes against humanity there needs to be a forum especially if the person is in the United States the challenge that we've always had was this whole issue of universal jurisdiction and my view has always been there needs to be a nexus for us or other governments for that matter to prosecute whether the perpetrator is here whether the victim is here the crime was committed here in the U.S. jurisdiction so I think as long as we look at this carefully and ensure that the proper nexus exists to the United States I think it's incumbent upon us to pursue these individuals because we don't want people to live here with impunity be able to roam the streets and do what they do I mean because obviously if they committed atrocities elsewhere who's to say they're not to do some sort of criminal activity here so I think it's important to pursue these things let me jump in I mean we do need very clear present in legislation so we can exercise that nexus we don't have that on the war crime statute and then as David said we don't have crimes against humanity statute you could have somebody who comes in the United States has been active in post-election violence in a country killed 5,000 people and we wouldn't have jurisdiction of that crime because it wouldn't be a war crime and even if the person were president here come in as a refugee we prosecuted as we do now there's a false statement on immigration forms which is something and it's useful but it's not enough and so there's that aspect of it now on the prosecution by others and our work with them I was very proud that during our tenure we pushed NL as well with the extradition of Colonel Montana former vice minister of defense of El Salvador to Spain for prosecution for crimes committed against Spaniards in El Salvador and so we found ways to cooperate with countries that are exercising in that case passive personality jurisdiction now that I'm involved in Syria I'm working very closely with a German prosecutor Germany has universal jurisdiction had applications to exercise it against US officials decided not to on basically a German interest standard now is proceeding with cases on Syrian regime having found that because Germany is so impacted by hundreds of thousands of refugees driven into that country by these crimes there is that nexus et cetera so that is a more broad use of universal jurisdiction but I think it's something that we definitely need to support I would say as I was there was one thing that we didn't mention today and I know the deputies will talk about it and thinking about the engagement of the justice department in all of this and in the sort of interagency process that we were of course during my tenure and during the tenure of my deputies involved in the atrocity prevention board which called together various parts of the US government in a really major initiative announced by President Obama in which our office played a key sort of pen holding role in establishing and then later joined with our other components within the sort of what was the J family the global affairs family in doing the kind of things that had to be done on an ad hoc basis in previous administrations to focus all of the tools that we had including the promise of accountability into ongoing efforts to fulfill the promise of never again and prevent mass atrocities before they happen you better stop there so please thank our ambassadors both for the panel and for their past work