 Good morning, my name is Elise Grande and I'm the head of the United States Institute of Peace, which was established by the U.S. Congress in 1984 as a nonpartisan public institution dedicated to helping prevent, mitigate and resolve violent conflict abroad. We're very pleased to welcome everyone to this important conversation on how to hold the perpetrators of aggression, violence and human rights accountable in an age of impunity, where civilians are being increasingly targeted in conflict, rights are less respected and officials and leaders in all parts of the world all too often act as if there are few if any constraints on their actions. It's an honor to welcome David Miliband, the president of the International Rescue Committee and one of our generation's most thoughtful humanitarian and public leaders, to discuss the critical challenge, this critical challenge, with Ambassador David Scheffer, who is a distinguished expert here at USIP, a professor of practice at the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University and who served as the first United States ambassador at large for war crimes. One of the most remarkable hallmarks of the past 80 years since the end of World War II has been the global commitment to holding countries and our leaders accountable for the actions they take in our names. This commitment has been shaped and is daily renewed through the application of the rules and principles in the United Nations Charter, through hundreds of international regional and national institutions and through domestic and international legal frameworks that are used by people across the globe to counter the forces of impunity. Yet, in spite of this extraordinary architecture, impunity grows ever more pernicious, threatening to undermine civilized relations between countries and within nations. David Miliband is in the forefront of global leaders and determined citizens who are crying foul and insisting that all of us do more to uphold the norms and protect the institutions that promote and ensure accountability. As the head of the International Rescue Committee, David is also one of the world's leading emergency forecasters. Each year IRC produces an emergency watch list of the 20 countries where the greatest deteriorations of worst humanitarian emergencies are expected. At the top of this year's list of Somalia, followed by Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo and Yemen, the list includes Syria, South Sudan, Burkina Faso, Haiti and Ukraine. It is no coincidence that in a number of these countries impunity is widespread and deeply embedded. USIP is honored to welcome you, David. David served as the Foreign Secretary for the United Kingdom from 27 to 2013 and was a member of the UK Parliament from 21 to 2013. Since 2013, David has been the President of the IRC where he oversees the agency's humanitarian relief operations in more than 40 war-affected countries and its refugee resettlement and assistance programs in 28 US cities. President Clinton once described David as one of the ablest, most creative public servants of our time. We're very fortunate to have Ambassador David Scheffer join us today for the discussion. David is one of the US's leading experts on international law and international criminal justice. He served as the UN Secretary General's special expert on UN assistance to the Khmer Rouge trials. He led the US delegation to the UN talks that established the International Criminal Court and he negotiated the creation of five war crime tribunals, including the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, the extraordinary chambers in the courts of Cambodia and the ICC. Ambassador, I'm pleased to hand the floor to you. Thank you very much, President Grande. I'm going to go on a first-name basis now if I may and I want to start by simply recognizing from my vantage point International Women's Day because I had this is the distinct privilege and honor for eight years in the 1990s of working every day with frankly the most powerful woman in the world who at that time was Dr. Madeleine Albright, first as the US ambassador to the United Nations and then as the United States Secretary of State. So when that happens you you learn a lot of lessons but one of the things that I recognized in her daily work was a constant effort to promote and elevate highly qualified women into the positions that they should by merit have and she focused her work tirelessly on that and it's certainly in my bailiwick of war crimes work the first US judge on the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal was Judge Gabriel McDonald, Texas federal court. She pulled her out of Houston, sent her to the Hague. She strongly supported Louise Arbor as prosecutor of the Yugoslav and Rwanda tribunals then she's strongly supported Carla de Ponte of Switzerland for that position. So you know repeatedly in so many areas she sort of demonstrated that and I want to tell you just one small very brief anecdote. We were in Rwanda and then we were flying into Burundi. When we landed in Burundi we were immediately invited to a women's caucus among civil society in an auditorium and as we walked into the auditorium there were it was just hundreds of women I was the only man there period and so I'll never forget what Madeline said to me as we were walking down towards the stage you know she said David you notice that there are no men here and we're going to be talking about the role of women in negotiating a peace agreement among warring factions in Burundi because their role is essential in this discussion and yet no men of Burundi are in this audience that needs to be corrected for the future and I've always kept that in mind as to the critical role of women in peace negotiations and I want to start if I may David with this question and we'll get to broader issues but on this specific one the International Rescue Committee I hope all of you picked it up this is a fantastic little document of four pages at the at the back side of it is IRC's recommendations and I find them all very compelling one of them says empower women in peace and security efforts the role of women should be centered at every stage of conflict this includes providing greater funding to women-led organizations empowering women in peace processes and supporting programs to address the disproportionate impact conflict has on women from your experience David and you travel a lot into these regions can you give us some sense of what you have witnessed the role of women has been in trying to deal with conflict issues and achieving peace within those societies so that these humanitarian priorities can in fact be addressed well the dangerous I spend the next 52 minutes answering that question let me just back up a little bit it's a true honor to be here with Lees Grandi I first got to know you I think when you were working in Iraq and then we had a memorable trip to Yemen together a two or three day to get Yemen and your commitment not to just a public service as a concept but to public service as an entrepreneurial risk taking drive to further the public good is I think really inspirational and so it's very very nice to be here with you in your new palazzo here the and in your new fiefdom because the experience that you're bringing from states and people experiencing intense conflict sometimes localized conflict and sometimes internationalized conflict goes right the harm this conversation we're going to have today and we must try and do that do justice the experience I'm also truly honored David that we're doing this event together I mean you've forgotten more than I know about accountability and so this is truly a discussion on the question that you asked just so that we're all clear and this emergency watch list which the IRC publishes every year was originally ten years ago maybe five years ago even an internal management document we took some data sources we looked at where was trouble happening where do we need to preposition people or goods or medicines etc and in that sense it was a relatively traditional certainly internal documents become something much more important for us and that's why I was really pleased when USIP were willing to have a conversation a discussion both online and in person about it because it's become in our minds an agenda for us but also an agenda for the wider world because none of the problems that we're dealing with can be resolved by us alone and just so for a bit of ground clearing we're committed to being a data-driven organization 67 I think different bits of data go into the construction of the watch list that produces the 20 countries at greatest risk of humanitarian disaster in the next year so it's forward-looking although obviously the data is backward-looking 15 of the 20 countries have been there for more than five years which is an interesting thing that we should come back to because protracted conflict has accentuates the injuries of the people suffer especially women and we'll come back to that but there's one other thing that I'm very proud of which is that the number of documents I've read from NGOs which say here are all the problems and the answer is give us more money we've deliberately just avoided that what we think we have a responsibility to do is not just to do penetrating analysis but to try to think in a systematic way and that by the way this is not me avoiding answering your question it's a slightly secure to getting to it we're absolutely committed to the idea that our micro social or micro economic solutions can only work when the macro context is also taken care of and we feel we have a responsibility to bear witness to the experiences of our clients and our staff in informing that macro context so in respect of the 20 countries we brigade our answers into three our solutions set into three buckets and I think this is important for structuring this discussion the first bucket is about breaking the cycle of crisis and that can be micro or macro so it can be about malnutrition and it can be about peacekeeping the second is protecting civilians in conflict which is very directly about the impunity agenda and the third is about how to manage better the global risks that confront us around the world we have a very interesting discussion the World Bank yesterday and our perspective is that extreme poverty is rising in fragile and conflict states but or and the global risks that face everyone from economic insecurity to climate insecurity to health insecurity and pandemics it exposes the vulnerability of the poorest many times greater than it exposes the vulnerability of us here and that's the context in which I think it's right to address your question which our experience is very simply from our clients and from our staff is that women and girls experience conflict with multiple inequalities that are not faced by men and boys you've seen this in Yemen in and in Iraq and tragically or but in some ways predictably when the interventions that are supposed to help resolve the problems don't include women they often exacerbate the problem the most extreme example of that is about male only peacekeeping missions which have levels of sexual abuse and other abuse many times greater than peacekeeping missions that don't have that are better balanced and so that's I think important also for us as an organization we have our own gender action plan which is about partly about our programs but it's also about how we work internally and it's very clear about what kind of balance of teams that we that we need because we don't want to exacerbate the problems we want to safeguard our clients and tackle the problem I think the next level is that there is very powerful experience I don't want to overly draw on this but as a youngster in the 80s and 90s I was very struck as someone growing up in the UK the role of the women's movement in bringing peace to Northern Ireland and the conflict in on the island was very significant and there's a quite an interesting set of histories around that so I think that that the peace making that excludes women is never going to be a durable a durable peace we'll probably talk about the Atlas of impunity that was published by the Eurasia Group and the Chicago Council but I think it's very important that across the five sites of impunity that are in the Atlas of impunity conflict human rights governance environment and economic exploitation at least four of them and you could argue all five of them have a strong gender component across each of them and the data that underpins that Atlas includes jet data specifically about the experience of women in conflict for example the Georgetown index so I hope that gives you some flavor I apologize for the long-winded answer and I promise I won't give such long answers to no no no and I'm so glad that you brought up the Atlas of impunity because that was say great to my next question which actually you have just slightly answered and I just wonder if you would want to go into any more depth on how the the dilemma and the plight of women and girls truly does define itself within each of those five dimensions in the Atlas of impunity is there anything else you'd like to to to say about that in terms of the depth of analysis in those five dimensions there is one thing and it would be good I mean I feel while I I mean I just I think we're good to hear your perspective for obvious reasons on this there's one thing I want to add though you hear a lot about autocracy versus democracy as the defining issue that the world faces the argument of the Atlas of impunity is that a better framing is about accountability versus impunity impunity versus accountability because democracy is one form of accountability and there is a broader struggle and the question that you raise goes right to the heart of that there are democratic countries that have high levels of abuse against women and violence against women I mean in the index it's interesting South Korea gets pulled down in part because of the position of women in South Korea so I think that is the additional dimension that there's no room for sort of complacency if you like in any society because what the Atlas of impunity brings out is that the inequalities faced by women run across the spectrum of democratic and autocratic societies and across the spectrum of rich and poor societies. I'd like to ask you a question along that vein you've had such experience with Yemen and the role of women in Yemen is a very important one I was at a function last week where Americans who had lived in Yemen in the early 1990s expressed such joy in how gracious and generous the women of Yemen were for them as they lived in Yemen and did their he was a geologist and you know did work there and yet they now look at Yemen as obviously one if not the most humanitarily aggrieved the greatest humanitarian crisis in the world is what the UN said at least prior to Ukraine Ukraine might you know be equal with Ukraine now in terms of dimension is there anything you'd like to contribute about what what you saw in Yemen in terms of of how women contributed or or failed to have the opportunity to contribute to resolving that conflict and their humanitarian state of condition. David I think one of the things that if you worked in Yemen you couldn't escape was the deep sense of disappointment and betrayal that many women felt about the international community so against all the worst kinds of odds in unimaginable conditions you had women leaders who were heroically trying to defend their families and their communities and assert their wives and they looked to the international community to take up that flag with them and to support them and to stand in solidarity with them and the deep sense that we weren't doing enough that we didn't care enough that our responses were rude and perfunctory and insufficient was felt across the board and it didn't matter whether you were talking with an organized women's movement or you were talking with women leaders in a specific community it raised a deeply uncomfortable question for those of us who are on the ground why was our response so insufficient why did women feel that rather than us as a support for them rather than us as a champion for them we were precisely the opposite very uncomfortable. That's a good segue to my next question which is I'm going to stick with these recommendations because they're so compelling I'm sorry which is your third recommendation on to break the cycle of crisis which is funding the front lines with the people first mdb strategy multilateral development bank strategy and as it says here mdbs are accustomed to a government first strategy they should shift towards a people first strategy and formalize strategies for funding non-governmental organizations to better support areas without viable options for government programs that struck me because frankly there's a little bit of deja vu there back in 1975 I spent a summer working for the president of the inter-american foundation here in washington which is part of the state department and the whole purpose of that foundation was to funnel us assistance to non-governmental groups in latin america and to circumvent which what at that time were quite repressive governments and you know the lack of trust as to how us money would actually be applied by those governments was fairly strong so the whole purpose was to get to those small NGOs and from what I could see it worked on a very micro scale but it worked and I wonder if you'd like to expand on that I think this is such an important point so let me answer it in two parts first of all the the diagnosis and then the prescription because I think it's important to bring out this point if we'd been having this conversation 20 years ago 80 percent of the world's extreme poor would have been living in stable poor countries and yeah 2000 so 23 years ago when the millennium development goals were launched what happened over the succeeding 15 years not primarily because of overseas development aid primarily because of opening of markets changes in china changes in india is that the story of the reduction of poverty in stable states is a remarkable success story and essentially it's a 45 degree line down in the number of people and I may have got this wrong Sam I'm looking at you you can either nod your head or shake your head that something like it's gone from 800 million people in stable but poor states extreme poor which was previously one dollar 50 a day is now less than two dollars 15 a day and it's gone down to 150 million and that may be a slightly pre-covid figure but you can see the the change more or less there's an order of magnitude that's basically right but the number of people who are extreme poor in fragile and conflict states has gone from 20 percent of the total to 50 percent of the total so it's now 150 to 200 million who are extreme poor in fragile and conflict states and by 2030 the expectation of the world bank is that the number of extreme poor in stable states can carry on going down but the number in extreme poverty in unstable states is going to go up so extreme poverty is going to become a conflict climate sort of disaster phenomenon and that is absolutely critical to the role of the multicultural development banks in how they handle this because these fragile states will become failed or failing states pretty quickly and by the way just as a sort of parenthetical bit of geopolitics Russia China other countries are not ignoring these states they're not writing them off as too difficult to handle in fact the Wagner group send platoons to go and support some of these governments and the Chinese have representation and trading links these countries are not irrelevant for geopolitics and certainly not irrelevant if you look at the vote in the UN General Assembly about who supported the condemnation of the Russian invasion of of Ukraine so diagnostic point there's a new geography of global extreme poverty focused on fragile and conflict states point two prescription you can't just rely on the governments to accept or not accept loans and then distribute them you have to find sometimes a way around the governments or injecting some competition into the governments or some incentivization into the governments or fear into the governments there's that there are alternatives now to be fair to the world bank I think this is really important in Yemen in Afghanistan in I think South Sudan as well they've developed the bones of a quote unquote people first rather than government first strategy just the afghan example is an interesting one the afghan reconstruction trust fund doesn't go into budget support for the health ministry and the education ministry and the water supply ministry it goes into payments of salaries to civil servants who are teachers or nurses or water engineers and it's been very important since august 2021 that that has continued because frankly the people who are employed in the public sector are a lifeline not just for their own family but for five or ten other families who have been hit by the end of the war economy and the collapse of the economy so there are some seeds of what a people first strategy means but it's still the exception not the rule and I've just got to come back from Cameroon the fragile and conflict state fund that the World Bank set up in 2018 was intended to give them a very large sum of money it's not been able to be spent and so it comes back into the central coffers and so our point is driven by the circumstances on the ground that in these fragile and conflict states you can't just rely on the traditional means of doing business if you want to achieve the anti-poverty goals that you've got and this slips quite smartly into another recommendation which is re-establish people's right to aid as parties to conflicts weaponize and politicize access to aid the establishment of an independent organization such as an organization for the promotion of humanitarian access document the denial of aid and speak truth to power that folds pretty nicely as an adjunct to what you were just saying this is really this is and this is I would say this but I think this is important as well what's happening in the conflict states remember there are 54 civil conflicts you've done some work on this 54 civil conflicts going on around the world at the moment separate from Ukraine eight of them with more than a thousand battlefield deaths so counting as quote unquote severe in these places the impunity is not just I mean we should have probably said this at the beginning impunity is a legal concept in layman's terms lay person's terms it means the exercise of power without accountability and in the worst cases it's a crime without punishment and so the impunity is demonstrated by two of my colleagues driving an ambulance in northwest Syria having a missile launched on them and killing both that is an act of impunity which happened in 2017 but the denial of aid is also an act of impunity because there is a legal right to receive aid governments and non-state actors who deny aid convoys to flow are committing an illegal act and they're guilty therefore of impunity and what we know is that increasing numbers of people in humanitarian need around the world of 340 million of them in total increasing numbers in that total are being denied aid by governments or by non-state actors now why do we recommend an independent sort of access commissioner humanitarian access czar I'm going to put it very very bluntly to you in too many places NGOs like us and officials of the united nations are worried that if they speak out they're not going to be allowed to stay in the country that is the reality that creates a culture of fear that ends up covering up these acts of impunity and where our argument is we need to bring some rigour some transparency into the exposure of the denial of aid because shame it should be one of the tools that's at the disposal and transparency should be a fundamental part of this and we we're not going into a blame game about the NGOs or the UN officials I mean this is about defense of the UN charter it's not about defending something that's western or something that's being imposed it's a laws and rules that have been signed up to that are not being obeyed and we do think that at the moment essentially literally millions of people are suffering in silence because no one knows and no one's willing to speak up about the denial of aid and it's less um how would i put it it's less dramatic in some ways than the pummeling of civilian infrastructure by competence in conflict but it shouldn't be suffering in silence and it and our idea is that we've got to try and bring this out can i comment on this yeah please as a former humanitarian coordinator in the UN we bore a primary responsibility under the existing practice of access to continually negotiate with authorities on the ground who would either grant it or not grant it now this is a very curious thing because those people who bore that primary responsibility are bureaucrats they're not state actors and yet under international humanitarian law if you as a country have ratified it you are responsible for ensuring that all of the other countries uphold it but who does the system entrust that responsibility to one of the weakest actors a bureaucrat rather than the the member states themselves who have ratified those Geneva conventions taking responsibility for ensuring that they are upheld everywhere at all times the real issue here is who is strongest place in the system to make sure that there's accountability and those are member states they're not you and bureaucrats who are doing their very best or heroic NGO frontline workers trying to uphold it it's the countries and the states that have responsibilities and capabilities and yet they are the first to say let the bureaucrats do it well they say that the bureaucrats do it but they also say they use sovereignty as a shield against external investigation and criticism and in a situation where in the 54 conflicts in a significant number of them the governments are competence in conflict that's right and you know you see this in the distrust that can exist in places where there are government health workers but people in an opposition held area don't want to have anything to do with them you can see that in Syria in the fact there's no cross line cross conflict line aid going into the northwest of Syria depends on cross border aid and the argument is it's nothing to do with the outside world our argument i think is it is to do with the outside world because you've made an international commitment by signing the UN charter to allow the to facilitate the delivery rate exactly and i just want to follow up with some i know that a question that you have asked uh in other air of spec spectrums is is so so fundamental on humanitarian issues if you're in a position of authority or you're um with an international organization that is seeking to assist the first question in an emergency situation is who do i call would you like to expand on that from your own experience who do i call first when the emergency erupts he on a humanitarian perspective so if you were a humanitarian coordinator in a place like central aprican republic and the responsible authorities on the ground whether they were state or non-state actors were not providing access so what would you do you called the capital of the country that had the most influence over bangi rang him up paris and said can you please uphold your obligation under international humanitarian law to get the central african republic to allow humanitarian access what's been very interesting is that in the last 25 years how often when you make those phone calls no one picks up the phone no one takes responsibility for assisting the international architecture that tries to keep people alive and protect civilians and extremists when i first started my career in the un 25 years ago everyone picked up that phone when i left the un two years ago almost no one picked up that phone when you called and again it raises the question about who bears primary responsibility for ensuring that civilians survive and live through these conflicts and increasingly what's happened is that that responsibility and burden is being carried by NGOs and being carried by bureaucrats rather than by the state actors as it should be i'd like to turn to ukraine and actually the segue is that russia is an occupying military power in ukraine and under the fourth geneva convention has enormous responsibilities as an occupying force in dombast crimea etc to care for the civilian population and to comply with frankly international human rights law while they are an occupying power in those regions and i think we've seen from what we can see from reporting etc and retaken territory that has been occupied by russia that there's been a singular failure by russian authorities on that spectrum and i raise that point david because in the atlas of impunity there is a one of the five dimensions is abuse of human rights and then of course if there's no accountability for that what is the long-term impact of that on that society particularly one beset by what you have rightly called poly crises in ukraine we have the challenge not only of of accountability for the aggression and the various atrocity crimes which are being committed during the conflict itself but there's also accountability for what leads i think has rightly pointed out is what is the responsibility of an occupying force while you have occupied territory and you are in control of that occupied territory is there anything that you've experienced from i assume you've been to ukraine and and and whatnot that you'd like to comment on regarding either the necessity or not of achieving some measure of accountability in ukraine well we um i have been to ukraine it's important to say we've not been able to establish operations east of the conflict line we're we're we're working far to the east of the country right up and i'm very proud that within 36 hours of haqib becoming um ukrainian held we were delivering humanitarian aid in haqib and the work that's been done by our teams is really excellent reaching out suffered through the the conflict and are still suffering from it because the front line is still very dangerous um but we've not been able to establish operations in the russian held areas so my ability to to comment on the situation there is very limited what i can do is obviously speak to the wider accountability questions and i would say two things about that the first is that documentation is very very important and in this the ukranians are doing an extraordinary job and the icc is on the ground also doing an extraordinary job and i i read somewhere 50 000 pieces of documentation and of 50 000 incidents being uh documented because that is very very important and the icc is in there and it's it's it that gives me some comfort second thing and i tread into this area gingerly as someone who resides in america at the um pleasure of the us government is that um the ability of the us to argue for accountability for others is obviously undermined when it doesn't have accountability for itself and it was interesting at the um unique security conference vice president harris made a very powerful speech about the need for accountability both in respect of aggression and in respect of war crimes on the the initial aggression and war crimes on the ground but i mean the number of people who weren't from the western grouping who said to me yeah but is america a part of the icc of course it's not ratified the in fact someone in your conversation on your panel at munich from a Nobel laureate in the audience asked that exact question yeah you know exactly so i think that that there is a it would be it would be dishonest not to mention that that is um there and i think that if you buy the argument that this decade is going to be defined in various ways as a battle between accountability and impunity and the defense of democracy is part of the drive to secure accountability but if you buy that argument then the narrative war is going to be fought in part on what about terry not on the substance of the individual issues but what about x and essentially the the allegation will be that western powers are speaking with forked tongue that they want accountability for others but don't want to calculate for themselves i have to tell you that is a an argument that has a lot of ground and obviously i applaud the determination of any government that wants to argue in favor of accountability but it's essential to point out that it's undermined when the physician doesn't heal thyself exactly and i'm plagued by that question constantly when i appear uh before audiences um lauren do i have time for a little more or yes okay we should we say that people are able to i know online and in the audience is that right and i just want to make sure we start that process i have one last question of course which is um there is a map uh let's see is it in here no it's actually yeah actually on the front page the map of your flyer and you'll notice that all the way over on the left is heady um and of course venezuela but uh it has always struck me and maybe leaves you'd also like to answer this from a humanitarian assistance perspective is there any rationale to try to develop a plan or a strategy globally whereby individual developed nations who have the capacity for providing foreign assistance development assistance etc actually are organized in such a way as to focus on one developed country will focus on one country to rebuild it let's say for the united states why we don't do more for heady i have never figured out that united states could take responsibility for heady pump enough money and assistance in there to truly develop that society beyond where it is now and then obviously for other countries on your map other developed countries would be assigned their their country of attention now i don't want to suggest this in terms of some sort of neocolonial concept but rather of a neo financial assistance concept would that make a difference in terms of how these societies are assisted to build themselves up again or would in fact possibly be a an erroneous experiment of development assistance i'd be interested in lisa's view i mean i'd argue the opposite i'd argue that sort of national protectorates have a bad history and what we suffer from in the international humanitarian system is too many different donors with their own priorities i'd argue for more pooling more combined resource more multilateral effort rather than sort of bilateralism of a of a stronger kind now geography history trade links people links create all sorts of informal responsibilities that mean that some countries play a bigger role than others but our i can report to you that our sector is plagued by fragmented donor behavior rather than unified donor behavior so i'm i'm concerned to avoid that i also want to say this though and this is something where i think usip if i may say so has a potentially really important role to play it's not just money if money solve the problem of fragile and conflict states i'd be relieved because although it's hard to argue for money at least you've got a solution when i think about the bermuda triangle of conflict climate and misgovernance it's not just that the three together create very very difficult questions about how you build functioning states it's that three of them individually are very difficult i mean climate is actually the easiest at least in theory because we know what is creating the climate crisis and we know that um fewer greenhouse gas emissions would mitigate it um or at least mitigate its spread but the the tools of diplomacy to tackle intrastate civil wars are underdeveloped and that's why civil wars go on for so long and it's why the most likely outcome of civil wars are renewed fighting and let's be honest issues of governance people write phd's about it but it's hard to find an answer to it and so i'm very concerned that while we're getting better and better at delivering humanitarian aid that helps people to survive and at the micro level to recover from trauma and to to eke out some dignity of existence at a macro level the big questions about conflict climate and uh governance are not well answered and the macro question of how you stop fragile states becoming failing states really needs the the the micro intelligence of organizations like ours and the macro perspective of organizations like yours i think do you want to want to have a go at that any perspective leaves that you'd like on either my direct question or david's follow-up knowing that we have colleagues who want to join in i i think a quick reaction david to your important point is to recognize that the institutions which have served the international community well in the last 75 years and that have served our regional organizations well and that have served many countries well are completely overstretched and in many cases collapsing and disintegrating and just becoming dysfunctional because of the demands on those institutions to respond to a set of crises for which they were not created and do not have the capacity to address i think in many ways what we're really talking about is a very smart way of addressing institutional fragmentation and breakdown and that until we are able to do that systematically and in ways which are creative the kinds of problems we've been discussing will not have an answer well shall we go to questions from the audience first and then i know lauren has some online questions that likely have come in anyone in the audience i know we have some journalists and you're more than welcome to dig in here hi thank you very much for your time to honor to be here a graduate student at american university studying international peace i just wanted to comment on the striking a new deal for forcibly displaced and just wanted to hear your perhaps even if you wanted to list states or nations that you feel could take this place including united states in the world to deal with displacement my both my parents come from countries that they themselves were displaced and thanks to the efforts of the united states and other developed countries of course i'm here today but i think some of some of that concern seems to be it's increasing obviously in this unstable world and there are many countries that are working unfortunately their populations against this concept could you speak on maybe this a little bit more on how other governments could respond and maybe what those governments should should be what's a list of governments that should really be working on yeah great so there are 45 million people who are refugees or asylum seekers today in the house commons yesterday in the uk the home secretary said that there were 100 million people on the move who could come to britain and what she was using was the figure of internally displaced plus refugees and asylum seekers and of course conjuring up an utterly absurd scare story to try to justify some measures that she was announcing yesterday because the as i point out on twitter the people who've been driven from aleppo to idlib as internally displaced are not about to come to the uk they can't get out of idlib that's the whole point in respect of the new deal for the forcibly displaced of the 45 million the vast majority are in poor countries or lower mid-lincoln countries not rich countries they're in Bangladesh turkey lebanon jordan jordan's now poor country at least or on the official statistics um uganda is a good example pakistan with a lot of afghan refugees and our idea of the new deal for the forcibly displaced is that you have to think beyond humanitarian aid in terms of the support for the delivery of what is effectively a global public good of hosting of refugees and that means recognizing in international financial institutions regional financial institutions iamf engagement that these countries need support otherwise they break under the strain of it and i think the new deal is about enabling those displaced and the host communities to recover to get education for their kids to get employment for the adults i mean i always say to people the the the employment rate among jordanians is between 25 and 35 percent among young jordanians and the unemployment rate at least officially amongst Syrian adults is in the 80 range and that's not good for syrians and it's not good for jordanians and so the new deal has to think at the macroeconomic level as well as at the microeconomic and micro social level about where people are going to live not in camps but in urban areas how they're going to be able to get access to employment and here i think ukraine is a very interesting example because of course the the the five six million ukrainian effectively women and kids who've gone into europe what have they been guaranteed they've been guaranteed rights to work rights to education rights to welfare rights to public services rights to residents so the toolkit is actually known and when it's properly funded as it is by people for people who've fled to the world's largest richest single market it's deliverable in a way that sustains despite all the strains and stresses of it some social contract and ukraine should be an inspiration in that sense but at the moment it's the exception thanks for the good question yes right here we've oh i'm sorry why don't we go first where the mic is and then we'll come to you okay sorry all right thank you so much my name is karyam tambi i'm a Ugandan human rights activist i'm glad you spoke about um Uganda and the refugee crisis and when we're to talk about accountability in the age of impunity we cannot exclude um what ms seven he has done so much as we have talked about Uganda hosting refugees we haven't tackled the root cause of refugees flowing into Uganda so most of them have been coming in from the Congo which Uganda owes reparations for um uh plunging and taking um uh mineral resources for years so the conflict in the Congo partly is to do with Uganda and i don't think our international partners are willing to hold ms seven year accountable i don't know whether um there is a way we could hold ms seven years government accountable together with our neighbors in in Rwanda um they have been partly um uh to blame for what's happening in the Congo so thanks for the good question i would highlight um South Sudanese refugees as well as Congolese i mean obviously you know the situation in Uganda far better than than i do but there's a very large there's a over a million maybe one and a half million South Sudanese refugees in Uganda and you make a very interesting point that while Uganda rightfully gets credit and applause including from me for the way in which it treats refugees there's a much wider context both about human rights in the country but also a wider regional context and when i said earlier about how the tools to tackle what is domestic conflict civil conflict there's a very important rider to that which is that both in their origins civil wars obviously involve have engagement of other countries but also in their ongoing nature the evidence of what's called internationalized civil conflict in other words civil conflict that has external actors playing a role that's also significantly on the rise in in the longer version of the watch list i think we point out 18 i've got in my head 18 of the 54 civil conflicts are involved international actors not just um yeah on a number of countries with two or more conflicts i think we've got in here um a uh i thought we had a statistic about the internationalized nature of civil conflict i may have missed my memory is that 18 of the civil conflicts that go on around the world have external actors also involved in them and that's that that's why the piece making is so much in some ways more complicated for civil wars than it is for wars between states sorry you want to get a question i'll try and find this statistic hi thanks very much for your comments so far my name's gaila and i work on middle east issues at the british embassy here in washington Syria is very much on my mind at the moment not just because we've got the twelfth year anniversary of the conflict coming up next week but also with the devastating scenes from the earthquake that we've seen in the past a couple of months as i know you know we every unfortunately now every six months we have this battle in new york at the council around aid access and aid crossings and i think northwest Syria is kind of the best and worst example of the politicization of aid and the kind of lack of impunity that we have the Assad regime and i think you know obviously post earthquake martin griffith did some great work with the regime and trying to get those two extra crossings reopened for a temporary amount of time but we see the regime benefiting massively from all this kind of earthquake diplomacy that's going on with you know loads of states now reengaging in a way that they felt uncomfortable doing so before kind of using the earthquake as a hook i guess my question is what what can what could and should we be doing differently in Syria because so far it just doesn't seem to be working thank you well it's a great question which i've learned in america people often say that's a great question and that often means that people don't know the answer to the question the that is a great question and here's my reflection on it it's not an answer because i haven't got a good enough answer a forgotten conflict is not a resolved conflict and Syria was a resolved conflict before and was a forgotten conflict before the 6th of february before the earthquake had gone off the agenda secondly the issue that you point to the closing of official border crossing points one from turkey two from iraq into Syria is a classic example of the use of sovereignty to deny legal rights to six and a half million syrians who live in non-government controlled areas um three or four and a half million in the northwest maybe two and a half million in the north in the northeast um thirdly my data and this is now a week old we've got about over 400 people in the northwest is that although there have been increased numbers of there's been an increase in the official border crossings we haven't got more trucks going through than before the earthquake it was i've got 54 in my head but i don't know i don't know whether that's right but i i haven't got the that's a week old but there hasn't been a flood of aid into um northwest syria and so when we say survival is success in northwest syria in the next weeks and months that's because the dangers of cholera the dangers of other disease is is absolutely over present never mind the lack of treatment for people who've been injured in the earthquake itself we lost two of our own staff members on that and then i just want to make one more point which is maybe so generalized it will seem glib i hope not the multilateral system has been elbowed aside in discussing the politics of the future of syria the un system has been elbowed aside even though one of your former colleagues geopetizen does a heroic job in trying to keep the international multilateral effort going russia syria iran turkey the astana process it's center stage not a global multilateral effort and that from leading a humanitarian organization i feel it's from my responsibility to talk about that not because it short changes the people on the ground we're trying to help and they can't be helped by the world because the world has been pushed to one side in some ways and so those are reflections not an answer and i'm i'm very pleased that it's that there's there's something you're working on if i can come in on the obvious point in 2005 at the summit of world leaders the responsibility to protect was adopted as a guiding principle to be followed by the member states of the united nations as we all know the responsibility to protect is based on the premise that if a government is unable or unwilling to protect the people it administers it is the responsibility of the international community to do that you don't have to stretch that very far to make the same argument that if a government is unwilling or unable to provide humanitarian assistance which is guaranteed to people under the genevo courts the international community has a responsibility to do that by all means necessary that's the corollary now it's never been pushed that far there isn't a humanitarian that works in a war that doesn't think it every day and doesn't wonder why the international community has not moved in that direction it is of course the decision of the member states whether or not they would move in that direction but i think most of the people who day in and day out try and keep people alive under the most impossible horrendous conditions imaginable would hope that that is at least a discussion uh lauren do we have online how do you operationalize accountability for versus impunity and how might the supply to afghanistan or Myanmar what was the beginning of the question how do you operationalize the framework of accountability versus impunity my answer that would be it depends what impunity you're trying to address if it's an act of in the in the middle of a conflict it requires documentation it requires investigation it requires if necessary requires prosecution and one of the things that the Atlas of impunity points to is the use of the universal jurisdiction um uh legal template which david can speak about to prosecute syrian generals in german courts for abuses we also raise questions about economic exploitation in the Atlas of impunity environmental exploitation those are different issues that would require different accountability mechanisms and i think that's one of the strengths of the Atlas of impunity which the eurasia group in the chicago council on global affairs produced under david's leadership um is that they show the multifaceted character of how to identify accountability not just in courtrooms but in many other dimensions that lead you to a more fulsome understanding of impunity society by society um it's 10 59 do we have time lauren for one more from online or okay let's try is the u.s. re-engagement with africa prioritizing geopolitical factors with china and indirectly endorsing and enabling authoritarian regimes to flourish in africa um i'm not sure if i've got the the full measure of the question but i think that the engagement i would be urging on americans or other countries in africa or elsewhere is people to people as well as government to government um it's about understanding regional dimensions to problems as well as local dimensions to challenges and it's about um recognizing that in the in the mouths of many parts of the world the demand of the richer parts of the world is for equity it's for voice and it's for respect and those are not um not things that you just confer on governments you confer on civil society on the private sector as well as on government and i think the u.s. could do itself an enormous favor by catalyzing the commitments around climate adaptation for example in the the climate fund the hundred billion dollar pledged climate fund that has never been set up since 2009 has become an absolute um cudgel with which the hypocrisy of the western world is attacked relentlessly and we're arguing that while in 2009 you could imagine that that fund which was intended for um developing countries to use for mitigation of climate change and for low carbon ways of development that ship has sailed we need at least 50% of that money to be spent on adaptation not just on mitigation because climate change is something that our clients in east africa in the sahel in afghanistan that they're living with it today in the middle east they're not just it's not just tomorrow's problem and we can't we have to we have to both walk and chew gum we have to do the mitigation and the adaptation at the same time i think this brings us to a close and i want to thank the audience uh both here and online for joining us the the big takeaway that i have is that both the document atlas of impunity as well as the emergency watch list for 2023 of the international rescue committee both provide practical conceptual frameworks for framing policy and refocusing our attention on what might work better than the status quo or might suggest that we prioritize our attention more than we are presently through the advice in these two documents so i do strongly encourage you to to get both of them and i hope governments do as well thank you david for being here it's been an honor and please thank you as well and with that i will bring to a close this session