 Good morning, everyone. Good morning, and thank you all so much for being here bright and early. And welcome to today's panel, the first panel of today, which is the Paradox of Setting Global Norms and the Selective Application of R2P as part of the 37th Annual Norms and Marjory Bendiston Epic International Symposium on Problems Without Passports. My name is Ellie Murphy, and I'm from Bedford Hills, New York. I'm currently a senior studying international relations and sociology. Today, we hope to explore the pressing issue of international intervention and the application of responsibility to protect. To tackle transnational problems without passports that extend state borders, international and global collaboration is imperative. Facilitating this collaboration among countries necessitates the setting of global norms or of shared expectations and standards of appropriate behavior by states and intergovernmental organizations. Unsurprisingly, setting a global norm is an incredible undertaking. It requires extended amounts of time and agreement among member states, which often have opposing opinions. Responsibility to protect a global political commitment established by the United Nations in 2005 seeks to prevent mass atrocity crimes, such as genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. This demonstrates the difficulty in establishing a global norm. This global policy emerged in response to the lack of effective action to stop or prevent the mass atrocities in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. R2P establishes that every state is responsible for protecting its populations from mass atrocity crimes, including genocide and war crimes, and the international community has the responsibility to aid states in meeting this commitment. If a state fails to uphold the agreement, R2P states that the international community must respond in accordance with the UN Charter. In the most extreme cases, this can include international intervention. Ultimately, the goal of this agreement is to prevent future genocides and mass atrocities. However, while revered among certain international policymakers, many aspects of R2P have been controversial, specifically who is held accountable and who is not, when it is implemented, and most notably in times when it has not been. For example, many cite the lack of implementation of R2P in response to the now acknowledged genocide of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. The same controversy with the application of R2P is relevant when discussing the ongoing cultural genocide of the Uyghur Muslims in China. More recently, the lack of implementing R2P after Russia's invasion of Ukraine has also sparked significant criticism. These examples demonstrate that R2P is arguably flawed in terms of its implementation. Given all this, we are left with one central question. Can R2P be considered a global or universal norm when it might only be applied to weaker states or states without superpower backing? The panel today will address this question along with a wider analysis of the role of international intervention, and I would like to thank all of the panelists for being here today. But before I introduce them, I would like to explain how this panel will run. Each panelist will first give an introduction or presentation of around five to seven minutes, essentially an oral op-ed. We have this time constraint to ensure we have enough time for the next segments of the panel, which are a discussion among the panelists and a question and answer session with the audience. The panelists' full bios are in the program, but I wanted to provide a brief background information about them here. And with that, I'll introduce our first speaker, which is Dr. Noel Costley. Dr. Costley is a lecturer in international organizations and international security in the Department of Political Science at University College London. Dr. Costley's interests include the responsibility to protect human security, peacekeeping, and humanitarianism. Much of her work involves the issue of consistency in global norm setting and humanitarian intervention. She is the author of evaluating the responsibility to protect mass atrocity prevention as a consolidating norm in international society, and her newest book has just appeared, which is entitled, Understanding Humanitarian Protection. Thank you so much for being here today, Dr. Costley, and you're welcome to give your opening remarks. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you very much for having me. Okay, I was tasked with the role of briefly defining the concept of norm and how we might measure norm consolidation. So what I have prepared for you is a very brief PowerPoint presentation, which I hope will shed a bit more light on the meaning of norm. I think what we need to realize is that there are different ways in which the term norm is being used, and that sometimes leads to confusion, particularly when we think about is R2PA norm? How consolidated is it as a norm of international society? So I think it makes sense to step back and think about how do we define the meaning of a norm in the first place? So if we think about it in terms of a norm of social practice, which is different to the meaning of the responsibility to protect or any other norm as a norm in international law, which we'll talk about a little later on. So if we think about it as a norm of social practice, then I think what we are referring to is, as you can see here, to be on the slide, harmony of conduct or practice with past performance or stated aims. Another dimension of consistency, so if we think about it in terms of selective application of a norm or the responsibility to protect norm, if indeed we conclude that it is a norm, is the extent to which there is agreement or harmony of parts or features of this norm to one another or a whole. So how consistent is the responsibility to protect as a norm in terms of its individual components, the principles that make up the norm, and how consistent is it with regard to the way in which it fits in to the normative structure of international society? So I think these are two separate dimensions that it is worth thinking about individually. Okay, so let's start with the second one, harmony of conduct or practice with past performance or stated aims. So that is something a standard against which we can measure the responsibility to protect. Do states routinely respond to grave violations of human rights? And if so, how do they respond? Do we observe that there is consistency of practice with regard to international responses? Okay, so for those of you familiar with statistics, this is a normal distribution. And so if we think about a norm in theoretical terms, from a sociological perspective, we would understand a norm to be a routine, a regular habitual type of behavior and social practice. So look around in the room today. Most or almost all of you are wearing a face mask. Okay, it is an appropriate thing to do in this context, given that this is the middle of or the end of a pandemic. Okay, so you think it is appropriate to be wearing a face mask, hence you wear a face mask. So I think wearing a face mask would probably be somewhere in the middle of this normal distribution, but that is not to say that if on occasion, some individuals do not wear a face mask, that there is not a strong norm of wearing a face mask in public spaces currently. So this is one way that we can think about a norm. Okay, so if we bear that in mind, where do we stand? Right, so before we come to our Topias a norm, I think there are different types of norms. So some norms are adhered to very frequently. So the shape of the curve is narrower. Whereas other norms, there's greater deviation in terms of the range of practice that we observe. Okay, so where are we in terms of the responsibility to protect as a norm? So I think one way of thinking about this would be that if there is a robust and consistent response to grave violations of human rights and mass atrocities, then we can see and then we can observe that there is a norm of social practice. And this is quite independent of what we observe in international law. And it is independent of what we think is the right thing to do in terms of ethics. So I think the key thing to bear in mind with norms in general is that they are, they are value neutral. It is observing practice. So if we got to a point where as a matter of routine, we responded internationally, when we observe these grave violations of human rights, then I think we can begin to see the consolidation of R2P as a norm of international practice. Okay, moving to the first part of the definition, agreement or harmony of parts or features to one another or a whole in terms of the consistency of R2P as a norm. And then we'll talk much more about this dimension later on throughout the course of the panel. So as you can see, there are many different things that might qualify as norms or habitual behavior in international practice. And so where does R2P fit in here? And where does it fit in the hierarchy of norms? So if we have the norm of wearing a face mask, in what conditions is it appropriate to be wearing a face mask? That's one dimension of it. But what do we also observe actually happens in practice? So in what circumstances do individuals remove their face mask? And in that sense, I think there's much more work to be done in terms of R2P as a norm, in terms of figuring out which other norms are there and which norm takes precedence in which circumstances. And that's the end of my video. Thank you so much, Dr. Kossley, for your insights. I'll now introduce our second panelist, Dr. Karen Smith. Dr. Karen Smith served as special advisor to the United Nations Secretary General on the responsibility to protect from January 2019 to July 2021. She teaches international relations at the Institute for History at Leiden University in the Netherlands and is an honorary research associate at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, where she was based. Dr. Smith's research focuses on non-western contributions to international relations, as well as on the changing global order. Recent publications include a co-edited book, International Relations from the Global South, and a co-edited special issue challenging the single origin story of IR in review of international studies. Dr. Smith, you are welcome to give your opening remarks. Thank you so much, Ellie. And I also just want to thank the organizers for inviting me to be here. I've been here for the last few days and it's been absolutely fantastic to listen to all of the presentations, but also to interact with some of the students. I've already learned a lot, so I just want to really thank you for allowing me to be a part of this. And I'm also very happy that we're talking about the responsibility to protect, because as you know, it's perhaps a topic that is not always addressed, especially not in undergraduate courses. So I'm very happy. And I think that might have something to do with your professor, William, sitting at the back there, that he may have something to do with the focus on RTP. So I'm very, very glad to hear that. I just wanted to say that even though I am an IR scholar and an academic, I don't look at RTP from an academic perspective. So my input is going to be completely from the practical experience that I've had serving a special advisor and the interactions I've had with member states, et cetera. And so I perhaps start by saying that I learn a lot by listening to people like Noel as well, because in terms of norms, I think it's very important for us to unpack what it means when we talk about RTP, whether it is an international norm or not. But I also think that sometimes academic discussions about norms and about RTP can become quite theoretical and abstract. So I wanted to just quickly just come back to remind ourselves what it is that we're talking about. What is RTP? What is the responsibility to protect? It's essentially about preventing the gravest human rights violations, the killing of people based not on what they did, but who they are. And I think it's also important for us when we think about it as a norm to think about what actually happened in 2005 when unanimously the member states of the UN adopted this principle. And at the UN, we refer to it as a principle, not a norm. And that's a debate that we can get into. But what happened when they actually adopted this norm? It was a major shift in terms of thinking about sovereignty, sovereignty as perhaps being the foundational norm on which the international system is based. And so this rethinking of sovereignty as not a right, so not just a right of states, a right of governments, but actually a responsibility. So a responsibility that governments have towards their own people, but not just towards their own people, also towards people in other states. That is a major shift in terms of international relations. And that's something that I think we should not lose sight of. I also want to say that, of course, despite the existence of R2P, whether or not we consider it to be a norm, and the promises of never again, we know that mass atrocities continue to happen as we speak in different parts of the world. And so it's clear that as an international community, as UN member states, but also as individuals, we have failed to fulfill the promise made in 2005 to protect populations from atrocity crimes. Now, I also want to say here that my argument is that this is not a failure of the principle or the norm, it's a failure of its implementation. And this is partly due to the problem of selective application, which is part of what we will be talking about today. Now, this is not to say that there have not been positive developments with regards to both the conceptual and the operational evolution of the principle. At the practical level, there are a number of success stories of where action has prevented the occurrence of the most horrific crimes, and maybe we can get into some of these in the discussion. Also, if we look at what's been happening institutionally, both within the United Nations in terms of continued support for the principle, something which I can elaborate on perhaps later in the questions set, a section of this panel as well. We've also seen institutional developments at the national level with many, many governments appointing what are called R2P focal points. So these are senior officials in governments that have the responsibility to look at how the rest of government actually thinks about atrocity prevention in all of the work that they do. But I think we also need to make a distinction between the prevention side of R2P, which has received a lot of attention and there's been quite a lot of progress made in that regard. So some of the success stories that I refer to are also successes of prevention, whereas we've not seen so much success in terms of the reactive side of R2P, the response side. And so I think the simple fact is that we've not done enough. We've not done enough for the Rohingya people who Ellie has already mentioned who dare not go home for fear of being slaughtered. We've not done enough for the women of South Sudan whose daily lives are plagued with memories and fears of sexual violence. We've not done enough for the children of Syria who know no life other than that of death and fear. And I also think it's important for our discussion to note that while there has been this emphasis particularly in the UN on emphasizing the prevention side of R2P and that has to do as well with which parts of R2P are regarded as controversial by states and we can get into that as well. This kind of false perception that R2P is primarily about military intervention remains pervasive. And part of that then also is that because of that it remains a matter for the UN Security Council. And I think this neglects the reality that what we have witnessed in recent years is really not over eagerness for military intervention in states to prevent the commission of atrocity crimes, but rather great reluctance of states to take any action even in the face of grave crimes being committed. And so here I want to just remind us and Ellie has also referred to this in her introduction that action can take many forms including all of the peaceful instruments available under the UN Charter, things like mediation, fact-finding missions, peacekeeping as well, sanctions in terms of economic mechanisms and of course military action in line as Ellie has pointed out with the UN Charter is the very very last resort. And of course they can only be authorized by UN Security Council resolution not by an individual state and this is of course one of the things that sets R2P apart from humanitarian intervention so we have to make that distinction as well. But I want to end on this note that we also need to think about R2P and we think about all the norms associated with R2P not just as a peace and security issue but as a human rights issue. Because by their very nature atrocity crimes constitute the most serious human rights violations and we also know that human rights violations are the precursors to the commission of atrocity crimes. And so I think we should think about this when we think about selective applicability as well which is something which we'll talk about too. And then just finally I also want you to think about when you're thinking perhaps about questions that you can ask us later about some of the issues that have been touched on in some of the panels over the last few days that I think link very well to some of the things that we'll be talking about today. So the first panel the first evening was about you know social media and how hate speech and incitement of violence can be spread through social media and I think that's such an important thing to talk about in this case as well. Yesterday we spoke about climate refugees right so of course there's a big question about does climate change constitute a a mass atrocity threat right and in what sense do we talk about it as a as a threat multiplier or should climate change be included in the kind of mandate of R2P. So these are questions that we can talk about and also just refugees there will be a panel later today on refugees and migration as well where does that fit into our thinking about R2P. Thank you very much. Thank you Dr. Smith for your remarks. It's my pleasure to introduce our third and final panelist today Kieran Gore. Kieran Gore is the council in the law offices of Charles H. Camp PC working on all facets of international dispute resolution. Over the past 10 years Ms. Gore has developed expertise in public and private international law, foreign investment strategies, and international dispute resolution. She's the co-author of the article nation states must comply with their responsibility to protect Ukraine against the Russian Federation's ongoing war crimes in the March 2022 edition of the World Financial Review copies of which have been provided by the publication for members of our audience. Ms. Gore you are welcome to give your opening remarks. Thank you Ellie and thank you to my co-panelists. I've been here for the past three days and have learned so much from not only all the panelists but also from each of you students because I am not an international relations person. I've never studied international relations or international affairs or international policy. I'm squarely a lawyer and I look at international disputes and I write and research and study public international law. So when you take that perspective that I bring to the table I look at this very differently than many of you might and many of my fellow panelists do. Usually when I see a challenge and to be clear I'm usually wearing litigator hats, litigator glasses. So I'm usually looking for a problem and how to prosecute and find a breach and resolve that problem and I'm usually looking for obligations and breaches. And so I use the word obligations rather than responsibilities and breaches means when you don't meet your obligations. Those obligations will usually require remedies or redress of some kind and the law requires that. So as a public international lawyer my inquiry is more about balancing those concepts with the concepts of sovereignty. So it's not that different from what Karen does in her work. And sovereignty is a really strange concept. It means that a particular actor, a state actor is enjoying a privileged position that's so invaluable that states are considered accepted from the law and then cannot be prosecuted for their actions in national courts unless there's certain exceptions available. So I draw upon those ideas and then probably the same systems and structures that many international relation folks look at. So we already have in place United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the network of conventions and treaties that states have voluntarily signed on to. That's our system that we have. I can't comment on whether they work or whether they're broken or whether they're ill founded. Actually I think my fellow co-panelists and each of you are probably better placed to critique those systems. But what I do is I take those systems as a given and I try to make them work and I try to find legal obligations within them. So when I take this approach I'm usually looking at things as a transnationalist and some of you may have encountered transnational theory in your classes and in your work. If you're interested in learning more about it from a legal perspective I commend you to the work of Professor Harold Coe of Yale Law School. He's also the former U.S. legal advisor and currently co-counsel to Ukraine at the ICJ proceedings. So transnationalists approach international relations and international law with respect for the structures that we have. So that's the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, treaties, conventions, what have you, all those systems that exist following the post-World War II era including the International Court of Justice. Unilateralists on the other hand are exemplified by acts of coercion and go-it-alone tactics. So if we want a really great example of that in recent history we can look to the perspectives of President Donald Trump and his America first ideology. So it was very much we're in it for America first and it's not about the rest of the world as much as it is about prioritizing our own goals. So if we turn back to wearing all these ideas and lenses with us to R2P that's where the structure comes into play. R2P isn't delineated in any treaty or convention but many scholars, nations, and United Nations itself recognize it as an international norm and thus part of, I would argue, customary international law which might be a controversial proposition. Once a principle is accepted as a principle of customary international law it becomes binding upon all states regardless of whether it's codified as such and importantly regardless of whether the state consents. This is inherent to the transnationalist view which values cooperation over unilateral tactics and coercion and sheer force. So if we accept R2P as an international norm which it likely is and Noelle can tell us more about whether she agrees with that view we can also accept that it's been recognized and although it's been selectively applied to date we have a large track record of it's the norm turning into an increasingly growing movement. It's been invoked by the UN Security Council at least 80 times. It's been invoked in Human Rights Council resolutions at least 50 times and it's been invoked in General Assembly resolutions at least 13 times. So I would posit that it's binding upon all states. R2P can also be seen in the Fourth Geneva Convention for the protection of civilian persons in times of war and specifically that convention provides that civilians are to be protected from murder, torture or brutality. So in 2001 the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty convened in Canada it articulated a global responsibility to protect, react to and rebuild following human rights crisis. In 2009 the UN Secretary General released a report on the responsibility to protect and has done so every year demonstrating the gradual acceptance of the principle. Additionally supporters of the responsibility to protect principle rely upon the belief that the underlying principles and goals of the UN Charter can only be realized when its text is read in the context of changing geopolitical and economic realities. So although Article 2.4 of the UN Charter does not include an exception for unilateral intervention involving the use of force based on humanitarian interests it's understood that the Charter aims to promote peace and respect for human rights. Thus I would argue that customary international law must evolve where a normative change has taken place and international law recognizes the responsibility to protect and the legitimacy of unilateral force only in limited circumstances. The UN Charter also provides that all member states shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such manner that the international peace and security and justice are not endangered and that all members shall refrain from in their international relations from the threat or use of force against territorial integrity or political independence of any state or in any other manner inconsistent with the purpose of the United Nations. So in sum the UN Charter reflects the worldview the transnationalist worldview that we collectively adopted as states following World War II that unilateral tactics coercion sheer force would no longer re-tolerate to compel individuals or other states to personal ambitions or desires. So this is where I would bring in the idea of breach. The relevance of these principles to today's world cannot be underscored. We're going to turn the rest of this panel to whether selective application can change these norms or whether it impacts whether these norms are actually legally binding as customary international law. I won't spend too much time on that because I think even in the question and answer section that we have with the audience we'll focus on that as well but I'd like to stop there for the time being. Thank you so much for your remarks Ms. Gore. We'll now move on to the moderated section of our panel and all of these questions are open to all of the panelists and I'd like to start us off by asking a question that you've all touched upon in your opening remarks but it really gets to the crux of what this panel aims to address and that is do you consider R2P to be an international norm and Dr. Crossley if you'd like to start us off. Yeah so I already outlined the way in which I think we can the ways in which I think we can define norm and then begin to think about how we could measure normative consolidation. So there is already a bit of empirical work on that much of it qualitative but there is also an emerging literature or paper that I'm currently working on exploring whether we can actually measure the quantitatively the extent to which protection norms are gaining traction. So this I think is work in progress but we're making progress but I think so based on my previous question I think the way in which I would answer this is that first of all we need to distinguish the legal dimension the extent to which it is being incorporated or in which existing law I should say is being reinterpreted to make space for this emerging norm this is one dimension and the other dimension is whether international practice is changing and I think we tend to be quite pessimistic we tend to say well there is still selectivity and not enough is being done and we tend to overlook the progress that we've already made and I think that progress is actually quite substantial and quite significant we now have many more international institutions that are either exclusively working on protection international protection and many more organizations and institutions state as well as non-state and civil society that are working on matters related to the responsibility to protect. So I think both at the institutional level as well as in terms of international civil society things have really changed there is now a much greater awareness is never really the case anymore that protection crises aren't at the very least being discussed and international actors attempting to think about how best to respond to these crises even if they are difficult and will remain difficult to address. Thank you would any other panelists like to contribute. Let me approach the same idea in a different way than Noelle let's look at whether R2P is actually a matter of customary international law customary international law is an aspect of international law that involves principles of custom so that shouldn't be surprising but what does that really mean it's general principles of international law treaties custom is what the international court of justice and the United Nations and many member states among them considered to be primary sources of international law so how does something become a custom of international law or a piece of customary international law it's the fact that's general general practice that makes it accepted as law so through repeated invocation recognition practice it becomes a topic that is part of customary international law and then once it is embodied as part of customary international law it becomes binding upon states so that's where that idea of breach that I described earlier comes in that if you do not if it is truly part of customary international law because it is part of our international norms then it also can be preached by states parties this is a challenge for R2P and in particular one that I think Karen and Noelle have studied more closely because it must be repeatedly invoked there can be selective application and whether that is appropriate given all the struggles and conflicts taking place around the world quietly or loudly there are very many of them at the moment some of them are louder than others but the fact that they must be invoked and mentioned does not change because responsibly to protect in order to become a part of customary international law it must be invoked it should be regarded it should be acted upon but even if it's not acted upon it's only selectively applied doesn't change that needs to be invoked because that's what gives it the status as customary international law it's also worth noting that the idea of customary international law rebalances public international law there's long been ideas that states must consent to law that they must enter treaties they must enter conventions and by doing so that tells something is binding upon states parties customary international law pushes back against that concept and says that if something is so widely accepted for example as Noelle described wearing a mask in public settings where the building rules tell you you must and we're in the midst of a public health crisis is so widely accepted that failing to do so can put you in breach of the obligation and that's precisely the idea that is required here we need to build public consensus invoke it refer to it refer to responsibility to protect and failure to even mention it creates the risk that R2P is not part of customary international law so whether it's a norm perhaps if we can establish that it is it's repeated invocation and and consistent application becomes critical because that's whether there are legal obligations to act or not this obviously pushes back against the idea of sovereignty in some really interesting ways but given our transnationalist view that I would adopt and that I would advocate in favor of it becomes incredibly important thank you both for your insights on I'd like to get at this question of norm further because in our previous panel global racism past present in future we were able to discuss how much of our theory is rooted in Eurocentric theories of international relations so when considering this I'm curious how you see how this applies to the responsibility to protect and do you see that this is a global policy based on the western conception of human and political rights and Dr. Smith if you'd like to comment on that thank you very much I also just wanted to briefly mention with regards to the previous question I'm not a legal scholar so I can't comment on whether R2P is a legal norm but I would certainly like to believe that it's a political norm right I don't think that there's a question anymore about the responsibility of both individual states to protect their own populations but also the responsibility of the international community to protect populations so in that sense I think and I would even go as far as to say it's no longer an emerging norm it's an established norm that is no longer questioned at the UN or elsewhere and I think it also we can see that in the sense that it informs discussions in for example the Security Council around peacekeeping operations we now see that protection of civilian mandates even though protection of civilians is a slightly different norm from R2P I think it's part of that broader normative framework you know that that's become kind of almost you know every day right we are hardly seeing new peacekeeping operations that don't have a piece of protection of civilians mandate so I think in that sense we can really see say that this is a this is a political norm that that now has been established right whether it's still contested in terms of its application is a different is a different question but I also like the the I think it's a it was a title that I read recently by an author who said what doesn't kill a norm makes it stronger right so I think that's that's also the other side of it sometimes contestation is not a bad thing I think this is a really important question that you asked because there are many many misconceptions and misunderstandings about what R2P is and one of the big ones is and this is something that I came up against a lot at the UN is that it's a Western norm right so this is something that emerged from the West it's based in kind of Western understandings of human rights and responsibilities and and therefore it doesn't apply to the rest of the world now as somebody from South Africa I take that I take offense at that right because I think it really neglects the multiple origins of this norm and it really neglects the contributions that have been made by individuals but also states in the global South both with regards to the conceptual and the operational development of the principle as I said earlier you know R2P needs to be distinguished from pre 2005 forms of humanitarian intervention for various reasons but I think one of the one of the negative effects of that has been that we've separated R2P from its historical precedents and I think sometimes it's important for us to kind of look back into history because what that has done is that it's limited the conversation to mostly Western action and inaction and it has framed ideas or concerns around intervention on the basis of humanitarian concerns as a Western idea now while this certainly serves the political agenda of some states on both sides of the debate as I've said it really silences the valuable contribution of the global South in terms of atrocity prevention and response both in terms of ideas and practice and I think it also overlooks the fact that what today we think of as the responsibility to protect is founded on centuries of thinking and practice from around the world about the responsibility of political leaders to their people as well as a very long history in different parts of the world of interventions on the basis of what today we would call humanitarian factors and here I just give you some examples uh India's intervention in East Pakistan in 1971 Vietnam's intervention in Cambodia in 1978 which by the way uh was of course condemned by the west for biological reasons right Tanzania's intervention in Uganda in the same year in 1978 in response to the terror of Idi Amin and of course there are more recent examples as well so the point I'm trying to make is that R2P builds on existing ideas and practice not just from the west right the idea that you should not it's not okay to kill somebody because of their identity that is not a Western idea right that is a human idea that is a global idea and so I also wanted to point out very specifically that R2P very specifically if we're now just looking at the responsibility to protect also very much drew on existing ideas emanating from Africa in particular and these include some of you might be familiar with the the work of Sudanese diplomat and scholar and later special advisor on the prevention of genocide Francis Deng his work on sovereignty as responsibility which was really more about interning these internally displaced people but that idea really informed the idea of R2P and also there was a shift in the organization of African Union later African Union later to become the African Union from this idea of non-intervention right which was a kind of founding principle of the of the OAU to one of non-indifference and that was of course also reflected in the founding charter of the African Union in article 4H which essentially is R2P language right before it was even adopted in the General Assembly of the UN so I think these these are important things to remember and I also just wanted to emphasize so there was mention made of the role of Canada in setting up this commission right in 2001 that came up with the the report that that framed this term R2P but of course even though it was funded by the Canadians it was the the commissioners came from different parts of the world and one of the commissioners commissioners happens to be the current president of South Africa Cyril Ramaphosa and so they really kind of drew ideas from around the world they consulted different researchers civil society from around the world so again even that was not a western process and I'll come back later too because I know there's some Brazilians in the room in terms of conceptual development the the Brazilian innovation of responsibility while protecting which was a response to what happened in Libya in 2011 I think is is was a major innovation and that is a discussion which I really think needs to be revitalized but thanks very much Ellie thank you are there any other comments from the panelists on this question in that case then I'll move on to our next question and we've discussed how R2P has become more widely accepted among the international community but I'd like to ask if you consider R2P to be controversial today and Dr. Costley if you'd like to start us off yeah okay um I actually published an article about precisely this question a couple of years ago entitled is R2P still controversial and so I think first and foremost we need we need to distinguish the different dimensions of the responsibility to protect so I think intervention as a part of the responsibility to protect is still controversial military intervention and it will remain controversial because it is it is a very sensitive question so but I think many other aspects of the responsibility to protect are much less controversial and I think for that reason because of the shift in the conceptualization of protection responsibility I think for that reason it is less controversial than it has been in the past which is not to say that there is not still critique out there that some actors and we need to think about you know who is critical of the concept and why and this is about questions of agency who is doing the protecting who are the protectees how much say do protectees have in the way in which intervention is conducted the role of regional organizations our regional actors involved in civilian protection so so these I think are valid questions and I think policymakers and practitioners shouldn't shy away from these questions but engage with this critique I think that is really really important and so I think yes I think some elements of the principle continue to be controversial but other aspects of the principle are much less controversial if you think about mediation for example that is very uncontroversial it's a practice that we have known decades for centuries and and I think the idea that there should be a coordinated response and the idea that perhaps it's good a good idea to have mediation facilities institutionalized within international and regional organizations I don't think there's anything particularly controversial about that so so these ideas I think are beginning to gain traction as are the ideas around international sanctions these can be very clever tools if they are used wisely economic statecraft can be an incredibly powerful tool as we are seeing in the current context and they may also be we may need to think very carefully about how they are used so they need to be smart so they need to target the right individuals but they are nevertheless a very powerful tool I think towards the end of the spectrum of coercive activities that are perhaps less controversial than military intervention if I could draw upon Noelle's comments from a legal perspective there's certainly a difference between whether political norms and societal norms therefore equate to legal norms and therefore equate to customary international law so I think that's a controversy that we won't see passing as anytime soon that said assuming that we remain within that rubric what kind of legal obligations we have is is really a critical question I think Noelle engaged some really interesting features of that it's without a doubt many conflicts are violent or otherwise harmful to the general public before there's an opportunity for mediation settlement discussions treaty peace treaties peace negotiations etc so what's also controversial is what that intervention needs to look like it doesn't have to be if things have escalated into mass atrocities and other harms the intervention need not be military intervention or military intervention need not be the only approach and we have plenty of examples and I think Karen can well point us to examples throughout history of what that can look like I might just add one further dimension to it which is peace talks mediations etc need not be bilateral experiences for example the Indus waters treaty which settled a very long running water dispute between Pakistan and India was brokered through the world bank and the world banks role in doing so was so instrumental that it led to the idea of forming exit the international center for the settlement investment disputes exit is where a lot of international political economic disputes are resolved and investment treaties and other kinds of multilateral agreements and trade agreements will refer their disputes to exit as an institution to settle their disputes through private international arbitration so that's an example it's not one that goes to mass atrocities and presenting those solutions that's an example of an institution that we've been able to build which primarily comes out of the idea of well what is that responsibility and obligation to intervene and how do we manifest that it doesn't need to be military intervention it could be other kinds of intervention so I think the controversy is less so that we must do something but but what do you do and and what obligations does it create upon various actors whether they're states or international institutions thanks Ellie thank you absolutely I just want to add three quick points so just I thought it was really important that Noel said that it really depends the question about you know whether rgp is seen as controversial particularly intervention is you know has to do with the actors so who is doing the intervening or the protecting and who needs to be protected and so I just really want to emphasize again that the legitimacy of any kind of rgp action really has to be seen in a historical context right we have to take into account the the legacy the historical legacy of colonialism of foreign intervention by western powers in many parts of the world because this is obviously going to have very important perception implications for perceptions of legitimacy and this is why again Noel also briefly referred to the role of regional organizations which hopefully we can come back to and I know there's that's an interest of some people in the audience here not looking at anyone it's in particular but so regional organizations I think you know in some cases not in all cases have that legitimacy that perhaps the UN or you know western powers don't have the second thing I want to say is that again you know this is something that I often heard from outside of the UN when I was inside the UN that there was this perception that there's a lot of resistance to rgp in the UN there isn't right there are a few very loud voices in the UN and these happen to be states like Cuba, Syria, Iran, Venezuela, Myanmar now you know uh what do they have in common right so is this a group that you want to associate yourself with not really right so we see a trend here who are the states that are very vocal in opposing rgp these are the states that are you know essentially committing atrocities against their own people so it's very obvious why they are opposing rgp um so I think I want to make that point clear and in terms of the overall acceptance of the principle right if you look at voting last year we had the the the second only general resolution on rgp passed in the UN since so that was the first one after 2009 passed last year with the affirmative vote of 115 number of abstentions but that's a strong support of rgp so in and I'm not going to go into the details of what that resolution said but that gives us a general indication that there's not as much controversy as sometimes academics would like us to believe right so I'll stop there thank you for your comments um for the sake of time so we have enough time for the question and answer section um I think we only have time for one more question um so with that I'd like to ask if the issue with rgp is as a policy or is it with the current structure of the united nations and specifically the security council um what and given this what can and should be done to mitigate the inconsistency of the implementation of rgp and dr smith if you'd like to start us off sorry I'm talking a lot um but I feel very passionate about this so um I would start by saying that we cannot get around the question of political will right so I think the main problem is one of political will um and I started off in my introductory remark saying that there's not a lot of appetite for any kind of intervention particularly not military to save lives right that is just not that's not the kind of era that we're in and so things change you know times have changed I don't know what we call the era that we're in at the moment I think it's something like the post post 9 11 order um and I mean just with the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan last year I think that really kind of nailed the end of that era right so we are in this era where partly due to the dynamics in the security council the space but also the appetite for the use of force to respond to atrocities has seriously declined so that is something that we need to take into account the security council I'm just going to say it here I think the security council is an unrepresentative illegitimate body right um so you know do with that what you wish but so that that is a big problem okay so um that that is a problem and that constrains the way that we think can think about alternatives to uh you know the use of force for example even though I think we should be looking towards regional organizations um but in light of this serious failing we you know states have to explore alternative mechanisms for preventing and responding to atrocity crimes we cannot leave it up to 15 and in reality five states right because that is what is happening right now we're sitting back and saying the security council is deadlocked oh too bad right not quite because we know that there are other things happening with regards to ukraine for example um but in terms of what can be done so I want to start with the security council even though you know my views on it um I think there are things that can try to address the problem of inconsistency and selective applications so there's the french-mexican initiative which some of you might be aware of there's also a related code of conduct under the act group but essentially what this is about it's a move to say um that permanent members of the security council do not use their veto in situations of atrocity crimes right so that they voluntarily give up their right to the veto they're now more than 120 states who support this proposal unfortunately only two of the p5 the UK and France right so that is a problem in itself but that's building some pressure to say we find it unacceptable that you know five states can hold the world capture when it comes to such a serious issue as atrocity crimes um I want to just briefly mention the responsibility while protecting so this is something which came out of uh you know what happened in Libya which we can talk about as well and so it was really about once the security council authorizes um a use of force to uh protect populations uh how do we then hold what happens next how do we hold the security council um accountable right because essentially what happened in Libya and we can debate about whether that was a good intervention or not it kind of you know it got out of hand the security council was no longer in charge of what NATO was doing and then there were you know the subsequent criticisms of regime change etc so this idea of somehow you know um complimenting r2p with rwp so saying we also need to look at what happens once an intervention is uh is ongoing I think that can also help to address some of the fears of inconsistency selective application etc but I think perhaps the most important thing is we need to look towards other parts of the un system um to take more responsibility so for one the general assembly uh and for those of you are interested there's an excellent report that was published last year um it's under the global center for r2p's uh on its website about the powers of the general assembly in preventing mass atrocities the general assembly is not doing all that it can right so also for all the states from the global south who say oh the security council is not doing anything you know that what a terrible you know thing for us well they could be doing more in the general assembly as well the human rights council is another one I mentioned earlier already that human rights is at the heart of r2p there's lots that the human rights council can do through its special procedures through its universal periodic reviews etc etc um regional organizations perhaps we can talk more about that um in the in the discussion I think that's really important but I also want to say that states all states but particularly states in the global north are unfortunately uh hypocritical in the way that they look at r2p they see it entirely as a foreign policy issue right and that also does not create a sense of we're all in this together and and r2p applies to everybody um and so if we look at what happened in the u.s last year right on the 6th of january the election related violence now as somebody if you're monitoring risks of potential atrocities that kind of you know a challenge of an election result and and potential violence that follows is a huge risk it's a huge trigger and so you know many many of us in the field were saying hang on a second the u.s is potentially at risk of atrocity crimes right also in terms of the hate speech the the incredible uh discrimination in the country etc the u.s is doing you know a pretty good job in terms of looking at atrocity prevention as a foreign policy issue but what is it doing in terms of looking internally and saying we might also have a problem and we need to actually maybe set some national goals and develop some national strategies um and then perhaps other countries in the global south will take us more seriously when we ask them to do the same i'll stop there thank you are there any other comments from the panelists if i could add just one brief comment if we think of r2p as an obligation and we accept that that obligation is being breached the responsibility to protect can be manifested in many different ways we talked very briefly about intervening militarily we talked very briefly about mill intervening through aiding negotiations and peace talks and that and and otherwise mediation other dispute resolution mechanisms that can be explored further but that could be undertaken unilaterally by states that seek to intervene and and support in compliance of their responsibility but there's also another way that you could you could approach this and noel touched upon it briefly you could impose economic sanctions so assuming that this international obligation is being breached and it's being breached in such an egregious way economic sanctions become a very powerful tool they're not just a foreign policy tool they're an international economic law tool and what we're seeing at the moment with ukraine is that many states have stepped up and impose economic sanctions and those economic sanctions that are imposed by states have waterfall effects for example corporations in in the interest of over compliance or adequate compliance given that they might operate internationally in multiple jurisdictions they're concerned about making sure that they meet the highest standard of obligations that they're being in having imposed upon them through sanctions so let's say the us and i haven't seen studies of this so i'm not sure how the sanctions may differ among different states at the moment but let's say the us exposes x y and z sanctions but the european union only imposes x and y sanctions for sake of over compliance and ensuring that they don't breach their commercial and other legal obligations multinational corporations will say okay let's take one corporate policy not only do we have a moral obligation not only do we have responsibility to our consumers and our customers but we also now have these legal obligations so let's comply to the highest possible standard let's go to x y and z standard so by setting these economic sanctions up and setting up multinational corporations which are which are key actors right you have to hit states or you have to hit bad actors where it hurts money is where it hurts you have to you have to control the flow of money or control the flow of their banking or control the flow of their economic activity and if you were to impose economic sanctions even if they differ which can be really hard for legal compliance and coordination it creates sort of a race to the top rather than a race to the bottom and that's usually the risk that you have in these kinds of situations so i just present that this is where public international law and international relations start to dovetail with you know private action corporations you know especially if we we do divide the world up into the global north and the global south and i have no opinion on those those terms because not something i study but in general the terms sit awkwardly with me i don't like them but i also don't fully understand them enough to comment upon them but if you do divide the world up in that way these international corporations multinational corporations are powerful actors throughout the world regardless of where you may be and they're even more powerful in the global south um they certainly have the upper hand with respect to technology investment opportunity infrastructure etc so this can become a really powerful tool thank you and just for the sake of time we do have to move on to the question and answer portion of this panel i'm sorry to not get to your thoughts dr crossley um so there are two microphones on either side of the aisle and when you come to the microphone please ask a question that is directed towards one panelist for the sake of time um and try to keep your questions to under a minute so we'll start with julia hi thank you um this is directed towards miss gore and miss smith um together so i'm wondering if you think that ultimately initially a positive obligation to support human rights r2p has transferred through the implication of its use and its indication to a negative obligation to refrain from committing the four like rome statute crimes of master trusty crimes human rights uh of master trusty crimes um to the point in which if you continue to refrain from these actions you can maintain the sovereign equality of your state otherwise intervention occurs because with libya despite what happened with nato arguably in my opinion potentially controversial genocide might have been prevented but it was not necessarily prevention it was intervention so is it this potential mindset of change to a negative obligation that makes it more of a an issue of the quality of sovereignty and intervention instead of the prevention because ultimately r2p should be about prevention not intervention we should not escalate to that point that was a lot sorry oh yes good um so i think for again for the sake of time we'll do like two or three questions together and the panelists will answer try to answer all of them um so we can go to this side of the aisle okay hi my name is isabella i'm a political science major at tufts um and my question is uh miss smith brought up that climate change might be considered a type of mass atrocity especially considering large populations that have been displaced and we now refer to as climate refugees um however using a broader and more abstract definition of mass atrocity could lead to the delegitimization of r2p as a practice and could bring about critiques of using r2p strategically to address conflicts outside of violent conflict and human perpetrated genocide um so my question is how can we ensure that broadening the scope of r2p does not soften the impact of its application or result in parties withdrawing from the 2005 agreement thank you thank you and we'll ensue me if you'd like to oh okay sorry we'll go to this side of the aisle thank you i'm chester eng i'm a first year master student here at fletcher i have a related question and it's related to what's happening right now vladimir putin did invoke r2p when he intervened in donbass before the outright escalation in ukraine and the rest of ukraine so would you classify his indication of r2p as a breach or a selective application thank you and i'll turn it over to the panelists so i'll start with the first question i think it was julia um so i think it's a really interesting idea to link the positive versus the negative obligations that r2p can imply but i think it's a risky proposition from a legal perspective because if you create too many if-then scenarios then you don't really know what to do so i would at least pause it that they're independent they certainly both exist i agree with you that there is both a negative obligation and a positive obligation so a responsibility not to do harm um i would think that we all accept that um and then a responsibility to protect and intervene and both of them being facets of responsibility to protect but i would see them in functioning independently at least that's my personal view on this yeah um i think um i'll address the question on um climate um and protection responsibilities and widening of the um of the responsibility protect conceptually um you know as with human security i think it's very comparable there are advantages and disadvantages widening and narrowing um a term um both theoretically as well as when we think about implementation and and policy making um i i don't know if uh you are familiar with um the work of edlock um but he wrote a speech by the secretary general um in 2008 that he um delivered at oxford university and so he came up with this idea of human protection and it is a much wider kind of concept um that really looks at all the needs of vulnerable populations both within the context of conflict as well as um outside of um the context of conflict and i think these kinds of concepts can help us um think about um protection responsibilities in these kinds of of contexts um as well and conflicts are themselves very complex kinds of situations so i think um there may be an advantage um to widening uh that uh that protection concept um i'll just quickly just add to uh Julia's question i think the emphasis is very much on on prevention right so it is it is about it's not because it's not necessarily states that are committing the crimes right so the the the emphasis on is on states protecting their populations from those crimes so in that sense it's really incumbent on them right under pillar one to be to be doing all of that stuff that we know contributes to building resilience against atrocity crimes which includes things like uh you know uh promotion of human rights etc so i think that's why there's so much emphasis on the prevention side uh and that's how i would see it so i don't know if that answers your question in some way um just quickly to the climate change one i think there's uh as noelle has said right there's a there's a great danger of of stretching the concept too far and saying oh yeah it includes all of this other stuff because then of course it does create the sense that okay you know this is from the position of those who are concerned about rtp this is exactly what we were worried about right kind of overstretch and it's again just a kind of smoke screen for uh you know an agenda for intervention in a way so how do we deal with climate change in that concept in that context um i i agree with ed luck that we should keep you know he used to say you know keep it keep it uh kind of narrow and deep right so that was what he was talking about by really just limiting it to those four crimes that doesn't mean that we should not be paying attention to things like climate change as risk factors for atrocity crimes right that we should not should not be doing a lot of research and saying how is climate change acting as a risk multiplier and there's been more work with regards to conflict prevention and not so much yet with regards to atrocity prevention because i should also note that these are two different things right people often get been confused and say oh we're doing conflict prevention therefore we are doing atrocity prevention no they're not the same thing um so i think in that sense it's really important to look at things like i mean i did a report two years ago on women and rtp right so looking at the gender relation so that's against something um so not saying this is now a new thing it's part of rtp and we have to understand how this uh increases the risk of of people uh that's essentially what's important chester difficult question i know where are you wearing now here okay sorry i'm kind of looking over there um yes of course putting the vote rtp right yes which is of course bizarre because russia is one of the one of the big opponents of rtp at the un so absolutely it just shows you how politicians selectively use language principles norms when it suits them and i mean sometimes i guess in a kind of ironic way to say look we can use this as well right i mean i don't know what how one would classify that i mean it's it's i mean it's it's it doesn't make any sense right it's inaccurate because as we know rtp has to be you know if you're using military force it has to go through the security council so it cannot be you know putin or you know any government deciding you know actually that you know we are on the basis of rtp we're going to go and uh protect populations you could have done that well could have uh you know people did do that under humanitarian intervention claiming that that was the reason they were you know going to different parts of the world including the u.s so let's not forget that in the current discussion about what russia is doing there's a lot of reference to you know hang on a second but other states in the west have been doing this for some time as well um and so of course this complicates this question of inconsistency as selective application because it's not just one side or the other doing it selectively it's everybody doing it selectively if i could just add to that there's a difference between inconsistent and selective application and wrongful invocation i i think i think karen was getting there but didn't say it directly just because you said it's a duck doesn't make it a duck right so so we've got to be quite honest um and there should be standards and that's why if it is a norm and we can measure it and and if people like noelle are doing quantitative and qualitative research to understand well this is the norm this is what entails this is what it looks like in practice then we can more directly call out those kinds of mistaken assertions yes i am not a politician thank you for your responses um how about we go with silomi and this group um on the side of the aisle thank you hi my name is silomi um i'm a sophomore here at topso i'm part of the epic locum and my profession um i wonder what the role that regional organizations play in desecuritizing the implementation of r2p hi good morning my name is zana i'm part of the Brazilian delegation here at the epic and my question is for professor smith but if the other panelists wants to answer that's okay as well uh do you believe that's training the participation and leadership of developing countries and the global south in r2p initiatives can have a positive impact especially in the light the in terms of legitimacy thank you hello i am rocio from the argentina delegation um i just wanted uh to ask i know you approach r2p from different points of of you and disciplines but if i may ask what will you say to students including myself that want to shape their careers in r2p thank you okay i'll say silomi thank you very much for your question and how did i guess that you were where are you now again i need to yeah okay um i guess that you might ask something about regional organizations um interesting that you asked the question about desecuritizing the implementation of r2p because i i mean i think that's one role that they can play but i also think that they have been playing a role um in terms of using security right if you want to call it secure oh securitizing r2p is it has a kind of negative connotation um but i think if i if i could speak more generally about the role of regional organizations right it's all the things that we associate with why regional organizations are important in addressing issues of global governance including conflict including r2p it's really about things like they are uh they're they're closer to the source in the sense they often have a better understanding of the context whether historical cultural political etc they tend to have more legitimacy not always right it really depends on who are the other actors if there are kind of you know uh hegemonic players in a particular region what their relationship is with the country etc um but i think so i don't know if i haven't answered specifically maybe one of the others due to the question of desecuritizing the implementation of r2p what i can say is the the success stories of where atrocities have been prevented right and i think of the election violence in kenya in 2007 2008 the constitutional crisis in the gambia in 2017 regional and sub regional organizations were at we're in the lead here right they were the ones who were really um yeah taking the lead in terms of reaction both both both with regards to uh mediation you know fact finding so all of those but more pacific measures but then also the more coercive measures they were the ones who sent in troops right uh in the gambia when it seemed like uh things were going the wrong way it was echo was who did that so i think there's really lots more that we need to look at in terms of how can we um and this would be a legal question right because at the moment of course r2p it has to be authorized by the security council in practice we've seen things happening like the security council retroactively kind of approving action by uh org is a suborg a sub regional organizations like echo us so i think there's a lot of work that needs to be done there in terms of what can we do to help regional organizations play a much more important role and maybe if i can just stick with that because that maybe links to the question about the leadership of the global south in terms of and where are you now yes there you are sorry sorry ana um absolutely right this is how we build legitimacy at the un and it's about some of the things i said earlier there is this strong suspicion still uh between and call it the global north the global south just for you know for conceptual purposes i make this distinction and and it shouldn't surprise us right it has historical uh there are historical reasons for this and so it's really about continuing this dialogue um and so that was one of the things that i was trying to do while i was at the un is trying to get more involvement by stage from the global south um at the moment i think it's it's it's great there is leadership so there's a group of friends of r2p at the un both in new york and in janiva so i don't know if you know but group group of friends are essentially groupings at the un of like-minded states who will get together to promote particular issues currently there are three co-chairs of the group of friends it's um it's botwana it's Croatia and it's Costa Rica which i think gives you an indication that this is not something which is led by the west right so i think that's really encouraging um but we also see that so with regards to um argentina for example within the the organization of american states um argentina plays quite a quite important role peru and others as well in terms of promoting the idea of r2p at the regional level again within that particular context uh brazil used to uh as we know you know things have changed in brazil so this is a challenge i think to brazilian students as well to say what can we do in future for to have brazil play more of a thank you doctors but sorry just for the sake of time um i wanted to get to the other panel sorry about that okay um well um i was just trying to say i think the role of regional organizations is incredibly important um i uh traveled to adis in ethiopia a couple of years ago just before the pandemic began and um and interviewed um some african union officials and what i found in all of their um statements what what they all had in common was really a lack of resources so um they want to be involved um uh but there are limitations in terms of what can be achieved simply because the resources don't exist so i think we think about it in terms of agency regional agency we also need to think about um the structure of funding um these things very simply so so there's that issue but um i think in terms of legitimacy for the responsibility to protect regional organizations are incredibly important um in terms of i think there was one question about uh about careers um uh uh related to advancing the responsibility to protect principle i think this also ties into um the consistency question and addressing uh selected application and advancing the norm of responsibility to protect and i think we we tend to think r2p states ios the united nations but actually there are so many more actors involved and this is i think this also creates amazing career opportunities because almost any career track you can think of you can now think about how what you can do um to help consolidate international protection uh responsibilities so think about okay there's diplomacy states think about international organizations not just the un other international organizations think about what you could do in academia for example um in public education more widely i think um there's still an absence of of coverage of these kinds of questions at the secondary level so there's there's a lot that could be done uh there in terms of public education in terms of civil society human rights organizations humanitarian organizations um amnesty international human rights watch msf uh red cross and so on um as well as of course international law legal careers i think might be a good avenue as well if i could just make two brief comments on the question of legitimacy assuming we are in a place where it is accepted that there's an r2p norm the next step and it would support the idea of legitimacy and then perhaps this also comes back to the Putin question that we were asked by chester earlier is you develop a legal test you develop standards you develop ways to measure compliance lack of compliance reaction and it's it's sort of a burden of proof question so so coming back to Putin the he's he said it isn't he invoked r2p well that's also his burden or russia's burden to demonstrate that that invocation of r2p was correct but you can't do that and you don't get legitimacy around the concept unless there's a test to be drawn upon so so i just throw that out there that legitimacy and burden and evidence all of that comes together especially if you look at it from the obligations that otherwise exist elsewhere and international law for example at the international criminal court right we keep hearing oh my gosh there's war crimes going on right now but it's not that we've concluded there are war crimes it's that in order to say that there are war crimes we have to do an entire fact finding an evidentiary collection process so that burden should fall equally on all sides of the coin my last comment on careers i might ask that you all think a little bit smaller and baby stepped and you could all be writing about thinking about speaking to people planning conferences like this one where r2p plays a central role what what i love about the current world to be live in is that everything is decentralized and everybody's a creator and we're all in a position to disrupt the norms and so if you think r2p is important you can talk about it which which is what i like to do and i think what everybody else on this panel likes to do including ellie who came up with this idea for this panel i think she came up with this idea for this panel um thank you so much for your responses um we are getting into the time of the second panel and um if and so if there are more questions we'll be having a breakout session at 2 30 um where you'll be able to ask the panelists more questions um about r2p and international intervention um so thank you so much for being with us today thank you um