 Let me start by saying that the work that I do means that from time to time, my computer's inbox sort of receives images from different parts of the world that are mired in deep conflict. And last December I just happened to receive on this one day two images which were kind of particularly shocking for me and which kind of stood out and troubled me a little bit more than usual. Because last December Syria was in the middle of what was the coldest winter in a very long time and snow had been kind of dumped over the ruins of Syria's cities. And frost, if you like, had kind of enveloped these villages and these towns which had existed for centuries as part of that very unique Levantine amalgam of cultures and faiths and traditions. But which were now sort of torn apart by sectarianism and by civil war. And the first image which was taken from a ruined high-rise building was of the jagged kind of ruins of the city of Homs as viewed through the window of a resident there. This was once a bustling city, a multi-ethnic and multi-religious city, now absolutely a ruin. It looked to me, it looked like 1945 in Berlin if you want to kind of a reference point. The second image was of a child for about 18 months old wrapped in a simple blanket. A child whose family had been displaced by the civil war in Syria and who had actually frozen to death during the night. I think it was the first time we tracked the kind of how the complex development was. The first time I remember getting an image where we'd actually seen babies freeze to death during the night. And at the time it struck me and it strikes me still that there could hardly be a more damning indictment of the international community's abject failure to uphold its responsibility to protect the people of Syria than those two images. What do I mean by that? I mean three years have passed, more than 160,000 people have been killed since the Syrian conflict first began. We now have 2.9 million Syrian refugees in neighbouring countries while 6.5 million Syrians remain displaced inside the country. Ongoing fighting has now left 10.8 million Syrians in desperate need of humanitarian assistance. 4.7 million of whom are in inaccessible areas, which is a remarkable figure in and of itself, and 240,000 of whom are living and dying, starving in besieged areas. And I think most disturbing of all, of course, Syria's civil war continues to inspire perpetrators on both sides of that conflict or on all sides of that conflict to commit new and appalling mass atrocities. For reasons of brevity, I'm going to assume the general outlines of how the Arab Spring turned so cold and so deadly in Syria and no one to most people here, but suffice to say Syria has now ceased to be a political conflict with sectarian undertones and has become a fully-blown sectarian civil war conducted with the participation of some secular combatants. Syria's vulnerable minorities, especially Christians and Alawites, have largely stayed loyal to the regime of President Bashir al-Assad. The government has actively organized civilian militias, for example, from these communities, deployed them alongside other state forces and sent them to attack neighbouring Sunni communities that are presumed simply because of their religion and background to be disloyal. And while the government, it has to be said, still bears primary responsibility for the crimes against humanity and for the war crimes that are being perpetrated within the country. Some armed opposition groups are also committing war crimes, reprisals against minority communities, killing civilians and extradition execution of government soldiers are becoming common. In particular, ISIL or ISIS or IS, as we're now supposed to call it, poses an existential threat to vulnerable religious minorities across Syria and, of course, now in Iraq as well. Meanwhile, the country has been kind of divided, if you like, roughly into three rival fiefdoms. We have a kind of Kurdish statelet in the northeast of the country. We have a government-controlled strip running from Latakia down the western coast and down the southwest of the country, including, of course, Damascus. And we have also then an unstable kind of patchwork of land in the east controlled by various contending rebel groups, an area that makes up half the country, it should be said. So Syria has ceased to be a conflict where the government is simply murdering its own people. It has also become, in the words of the UN Secretary General, a proxy war with regional and international players arming one side or the other. So I believe very strongly that the UN Security Council's inability to uphold its responsibility to protect the Syrian people and hold perpetrators of mass atrocities to account has been perhaps the greatest single failure of the United Nations so far this century. But in order to contextualize that, I think we have to go over some ground about what the responsibility to protect is and what the responsibility to protect is not. The UN and the entire kind of system of international politics, as we know it, is, of course, built around the principle of sovereign equality. The idea that all states have a right to determine their own affairs within their own borders. And furthermore, they have a right to territorial integrity, of course, which is not to be invaded, which is enshrined in Article 2-7 of the UN Charter. However, it's an obvious and a bitter irony that the walls of national sovereignty, which were designed to protect small countries from conquest, have quite often been misused by governments who sometimes view sovereignty as a license to kill. And by the late 1990s, I think, this state of affairs was becoming morally and politically unsustainable. And it's therefore the case that having presided over what were probably two of the greatest failures in the history of UN peacekeeping. Rwanda in 1994 and then Srebrenica the following year in 1995, Kofi Annan was looking to make amends when he became Secretary General of the United Nations in 1997. And at the start of the new millennium in the year 2000, he posed, I think, the question very sharply and very directly when he said, if humanitarian intervention is indeed an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, then how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica, to gross and systematic violations of human rights that offend every precept of our common humanity? And it was really the prompting of Annan, which led to the Canadian government in 2001, funding the ISIS Commission led by Gareth Evans and Mohamed Sunnoun, which developed the concept of the responsibility to protect, widely known, of course, by its abbreviation of R2P. And the responsibility to protect, I think, is actually a very simple idea, and it's focused around, I think, four mass atrocity crimes and three operational pillars. The four crimes, which are, of course, legally defined in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the crimes of genocide, of war crimes, of crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing is not in the Rome Statute, but it's another one of those four mass atrocity crimes. The three pillars being, and this is very much how R2P developed and operates, first of all, the primary responsibility of every state to protect its populations from those crimes. Secondarily, the responsibility of the international community not to turn its back, but to actually help and to assist a state that is challenged by conflict or is struggling to uphold that responsibility. And thirdly, and only in the most extreme cases, for coercive measures if a state is manifestly failing or manifestly unwilling to uphold that responsibility. And it was this idea, which was universally adopted, as was said at the 2005 UN World Summit, which happened to be the largest assembly of heads of state and government ever assembled in history. And I think at its core, though, the responsibility to protect is predicated on the notion that sovereignty entails responsibility, drawing very much on the ideas of Roberta Cohen and Francis Deng. And it seems to me that is the correct approach, because it takes the question of rights away from potential interveners and places of where it belongs, the right of vulnerable people, of vulnerable populations to protection. And so the underlying premise, I think, of the responsibility to protect is a fundamental rejection of both the politics of unilateral interference and also of the politics of institutionalized indifference when it comes to mass atrocity crimes in different parts of the world. So in the eight years that have passed since then, nine years, we have made genuine progress. I think R2P has played a very important role in framing the international community's response, for example, led by Kofi Annan to the crisis in Kenya in 2007, 2008, and informed very much the preventive approach adopted by the international community regarding the 2013 election in that country. It's played a decisive role in Cote d'Ivoire, in Libya in 2011. It continues to play a role in a range of situations where coercive military measures are not thankfully necessary. But the development of R2P is also being, quite honestly, clearly not without tragic disappointments and setbacks. And while Libya and Syria provided R2P's biggest challenges to date, there have also been very divisive debates around, for example, Sri Lanka and other situations. And I think after Libya, much of the debate around R2P tended to focus on the use of military force. But of course R2P is about much more than that, and running right through R2P, and I think at the heart and soul of R2P, is an absolute commitment to prevention. Prevention of an initial outbreak of a crisis, prevention of its escalation, and of course prevention of recurrence. And so for example it was with that in mind that in 2010 the governments of Australia, Costa Rica, Denmark and Ghana embarked upon the R2P focal points initiative. Basically an R2P focal point as a senior government official responsible for the promotion of mass atrocity prevention at the national level. And all together since September 2010 41 countries representing all over the global north and south have appointed a focal point. The network brings together states as diverse, for example as the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the United States of America. Guatemala and Cote d'Ivoire, Australia, Ireland has an R2P focal point very recently appointed, and Bosnia. The most recent additions to the network of the governments of Mozambique and South Korea. And it seems to me that such a network for prevention would have been quite inconceivable even a decade or so earlier. But to return to Syria what about when prevention fails? What about these tough cases? And I think Syria really is the toughest case because even with the Security Council deeply divided over Syria an action blocked by the vetoes of Russia and China are obviously individual states and regional organisations took action to uphold their responsibility to protect. And we should compare, I was just talking about this at lunch, but we should compare the response with 30 years ago in 1982 when the current President Assad's father killed somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 people in the town of Hamar and no one so much as issued an angry press release in response to that situation in 1982. It was very much considered a domestic matter for the Syrian government. Compared to now, by March 2012, one year after the current conflict began, at least 49 countries and the Arab League had already diplomatically isolated the Syrian government and imposed targeted sanctions. Other parts of the UN system also lived up to their responsibilities. The Human Rights Council in Geneva, for example, has passed 12 resolutions regarding and condemning mass atrocity crimes in Syria and had established an international commission of inquiry which has very much tracked the nature of those crimes and I hope will one day be used for prosecutions. Similarly, the UN General Assembly has passed seven resolutions condemning atrocities in Syria. But unfortunately, of course, the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly, these are not binding under international law. And so the Civil War grinds on. And we will never know what might have happened had the Security Council sent a clear message to both the Assad government and to armed rebels in late 2011 that the international community was united in opposition to mass atrocities in Syria. What we do know for a fact is that the absence of timely and decisive action has sent a clear message to both the Assad government and armed rebels that they could continue to do these sorts of things. That the absence of timely and decisive action contributed to the sectarian civil war that now endangers the lives of millions of civilians across the Middle East. And I'll give you some evidence of that. First veto occurred in October of 2011. The second veto occurred in February of 2012. The killing rate in Syria increased from approximately 1000 people per month to approximately 5000 people per month during the second half of 2012 as the Civil War sort of metastasized for one of a better expression. Between February and November of 2012 the death toll soared from 5,400 people to 59,000 people during that period. And the patterns of violence also changed. And this is something that we attempted to track quite consciously at the Global Center. So with each failure of the Security Council to hold the Syrian government and others accountable for their actions, President Bashar al-Assad's forces in particular deployed more extreme force. So for example, although protests against the Syrian regime began in March of 2011, Assad's forces did not widely utilize helicopters to attack opposition areas until after the second veto in February of 2012. And even then they exercised some restraint. Following the third UN Security Council veto on the 19th of July 2012, the number of helicopter attacks dramatically increased afterwards. Moreover, just five days after the vote fixed wing aircraft were used for the very first time against residential areas. And during August the following month the regime conducted more than 110 airstrikes against opposition targets including more than 60 with fixed wing aircraft. So contrary to popular opinion, whether shooting protesters or dropping barrel bombs on residential areas or deploying chemical weapons on the battlefield, the Syrian government has always been attentive and responsive to what's happening at the UN Security Council in New York. So we've now had four vetoes as you probably know and in my opinion an unprecedented display of callous indifference to mass atrocities in Syria. And we've had two successful resolutions, one which enabled the destruction of Syria's chemical weapons and resolution 2139, which was supposed to enable humanitarian access but is yet to be implemented. And this is just one of the reasons why we and some of our civil society partners are working for example with the French government and with Lichtenstein and the ACT group at the UN to push for a code of conduct amongst the permanent members of the Security Council which includes voluntary restraint on the use of the veto in mass atrocity situations. We believe quite obviously that the permanent members of the council have a responsibility not to veto when faced with these most conscious shocking crimes and the issue of the veto will not go away now no matter how much some of the permanent members would like it to. To shift track a little bit, well I think the media have at times portrayed the inability of the Security Council to agree about Syria sometimes to be the result of a kind of alleged misuse of R2P in Libya. The real problem is actually a much deeper division between the permanent members of the Security Council regarding the contours of the entire international order in the 21st century. So Russian and Chinese hostility to action aimed at constraining the Syrian regime is linked to a strategic clash between the P2 that is to say Russia and China and the P3, the United States, the United Kingdom and France on a whole range of situations and thematic issues from Syria to Sudan and from the future of UN peacekeeping to the universality of human rights. It's also worth remembering I think that while sections of the media predicted that Libya and Syria were the graveyard of R2P as an international norm, the facts indicate otherwise. Just to give you one, I guess, example of that. In the five years prior to the Libyan intervention in 2011 the Security Council had only ever referenced R2P four times in resolutions, two with thematic resolutions to a country specific. Take out the Libya resolutions for a moment if we can, but in the three years that have passed the Security Council has referenced R2P in no less than 20 resolutions. And these resolutions concern the trade in small and light weapons. They include the issue of prevention of genocide and they also confront the threat of mass atrocities in places like Cote d'Ivoire, Yemen, Libya again, Mali, Sudan, South Sudan and Central African Republic. And it's also worth keeping in mind I think in that context that 8 out of 15 current UN peacekeeping operations have an R2P or protection of civilians mandate. So my point being of course that R2P is not just a kind of cute abbreviation or affectation to be debated by newspaper editorialists but that actually the responsibility to protect is saving lives right now in places like Central African Republic and in South Sudan. But let's get back more specifically to Syria. I'm conscious that today's talk is being hosted by an institution dedicated to understanding European affairs. And so it's worth saying that Western, including many European powers, observing the unmitigated horror that I've talked about engaged in a bit of a tepid debate during really 2012 and into 2013 about whether foreign government should militarily intervene in the Civil War. However, support I think for military intervention was never more than lukewarm even amongst those governments that were most implacably hostile to Assad. This is in part because I think the balance of consequences argument was a very powerful argument with regard to Syria. No one wants to incite a broader regional conflict and become embroiled in a sectarian civil war in the Middle East. We've had several Western countries have had some experience of that lately elsewhere in the region. That's not to mention the crucial fact in my opinion that such proposed military actions in the absence of a UN Security Council mandate would be clearly illegal under international law. And although R2P is primarily a preventive doctrine, it is intended to also focus any coercive action against atrocity perpetrators in a way that is both morally legitimate and legal, and I'd put emphasis on both of those legitimate and legal. And faced with a deadlocked Security Council and in the absence of any other seemingly viable diplomatic options, Western governments, including European governments, have also debated whether to at various times, whether to arm the Syrian rebels and if so which Syrian rebels do we arm or not. The fact that a number of these groups, especially ISIL, are committing war crimes and conducting sectarian reprisals against civilians has, I think, turned the nervousness of some Western backers of the opposition into a sort of moral panic. And as the list of documented war crimes by those groups has grown, there's now an acceptance, I think, including many of those in the West who have been most verbose in calling for Assad's overthrow, that more arms might only enable more atrocities. Although I've got to say the caveat there is that ISIL's recent military gains in neighboring Iraq might change that calculus a bit for some of these powers. So is there a way out of this mess? Is there a path forward or is it just a case of pessimism and bleakness? To state the obvious, there is no easy solution in Syria. But I think that there are definite proximate steps that the UN Security Council in particular can take to start to positively affect the situation. The first it appears to me, and the most obvious one, is the issue of humanitarian access. According to the UN, approximately 6.5 million Syrians, that's a quarter of the population by the way, are displaced inside the country. And so for literally millions of Syrians, the threat from cold, from disease, and from starvation is now as real as the threat of being shot or being bombed to death. The UN has estimated that, as I said earlier, that 10.8 million Syrians urgently need humanitarian assistance while circumstances for those 240,000 who are in besieged areas is beyond desperate. And in these areas, you know, we have to be very, very clear. In these areas, food is a weapon. It's being used as a weapon. Civilians are being held to ransom and literally starved to death. And it's imperative that the UN Security Council break the siege of Syria and implement Resolution 2139. And I think the international community should be doing all it can to put as much pressure as it can on all members of the Security Council to pass the humanitarian resolution, which is currently being debated and may go to the Council in the next week. The second priority is for the Security Council and especially its powerful five permanent members to use their influence to push for a real outcome that transcends the failed and farcical Geneva II peace talks. Because even though a Pacific outcome to this conflict seems fanciful, it's no more so than thinking that flooding Syria with arms is going to secure an outright military victory for either side or stabilize the region in any way. Genuine peace talks need to have as their departure point, of course, a recognition of the fact that the key regional powers, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey need to militarily disengage. And that a broader regional confrontation along sectarian lines or otherwise is in no one's strategic interest. It appears to me that that is not actually a kind of hand-ringing utopianism. It's actually a sober recognition that no one can win this civil war and that behind those regional powers, Russia and the United States need to become guarantors of any eventual peace agreement. Finally, there is the issue of accountability for four years of mass atrocity crimes in Syria. Because I believe very strongly that impunity has emboldened those on all sides who remain most resistant to a negotiated solution. In the absence of accountability for atrocities, there can be neither peace nor justice on the Levant. The Security Council needs to refer the Syrian situation to the International Criminal Court for Investigation and Prosecution and the Chief Prosecutor of the ICC, Fatou Ben-Souda, who I'm a big fan of and who once described the ICC as the legal arm of the responsibility to protect, has suggested also the possibility of some sort of mixed tribunal should be explored and I think that's something that's worth following up on. So let me just end because I know we won't have a more general discussion, but just if I could, some very quick final comments on Syria. I think it's worth reminding ourselves that we call them crimes against humanity for a reason. Mass atrocities that are occurring in Damascus or Raqqa or elsewhere in Syria today are not just crimes against the Syrian people. These are crimes against each and every one of us as human beings and they therefore demand an international response. And while the cruel truth is that there is no quick fix in Syria, that does not mean that the UN Security Council and that the international community has to choose between invasion and inaction if those are the only two options available to us. And I think that's as true now as it was when the conflict first began. More generally, this year is the 20th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda, a country I've had the opportunity to work in several times. And with that terrible anniversary in mind, I think what UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's words regarding R2P are especially relevant. He said, I would far prefer the growing pains of an idea whose time has come to sterile debates about principles that are never put into practice. And with that in mind, I'm also reminded of something that Rafael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish refugee from the Nazis, who invented the word genocide actually and also was almost singularly responsible for the UN Convention on Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. He was once interviewed and he was asked what his political goal in life was, and he said, to shorten the distance between the heart and the deed. That's a great quote, which is why I believe that when it comes to stopping mass atrocity crimes in the 21st century, I still strongly believe that responsibly to protect is still the best instrument we have to bridge the gap between the sort of noble aims of the UN and the imperfect cynical world of global governments. And while we've, I think, largely won the battle of ideas, we still need to struggle for the consistent and practical implementation of R2P whenever and wherever human beings are marked for death and mass atrocities are threatened. Thank you. Go Ramele Moraga.