 Hi, we're here today with Ambassador David Sheffer. He was the U.S. Ambassador for War Charms Issues from 1997 to 2001, and he currently serves as Professor of Practice at Arizona State University. Thank you for being here. Thank you. It's a great pleasure to be here. Can we just start with you talking about the significance of the Genocide Convention and maybe some historical context of how it came about and how it was agreed upon? The Genocide Convention is probably the most important convention with respect to what we call atrocity crimes, which are genocide crimes against humanity, war crimes. A lot of these crimes have conventions, but the Genocide Convention was the one that sort of initiated the significance of the mass atrocities that we still experience in the world today. Sometimes there's a competition out there between what is the crime of all crimes? Is it aggression, which was kind of the mantra going into the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, or is it genocide, which has generally been sort of evolved since the Nuremberg and Tokyo days after World War II as the crime of all crimes? And the reason is that its heritage is sourced to the Holocaust, which increasingly became extremely well-known, better understood, and more symbolic of the tragedy of these crimes as the years progressed after World War II. Genocide represents what happened in the Holocaust. And for that reason, the fact that there is now a convention with respect to genocide commenced in 1948. It was approved by the General Assembly. Nations began to sign onto it, including the United States, in 1948. It seems like sort of right on time as far as the U.S. ratification, because then, unfortunately, in the 90s we saw the emergence of several interstate wars and war crimes and genocide. Please tell us about sort of the impact of the convention over the years, sort of the decades that followed, including the 90s, and how the crime of genocide has been prosecuted. When criminal tribunals were being built during the 1990s to address issues of genocide and crimes against humanity and war crimes in places like the former Yugoslavia, the Balkans in the early 90s, Rwanda, 1994, and more than 800,000 Rwandans who were perished there, in the extraordinary chambers in the courts of Cambodia, where genocide occurred during the Pol Pot regime of the late 1970s, and in the international criminal court, the permanent court that was negotiated, and the text finalized in 1998, and the court was created in 2002, all of those courts have as their bedrock crime, genocide. They also have crimes against humanity, and they have war crimes, but they have genocide, and in all of those courts, genocide was investigated and prosecuted, and in the Yugoslav tribunal, the Rwanda tribunal, the Cambodia court, convictions were rendered with respect to genocide against leading political and military figures of those societies. Charges of genocide have been leveled in the international criminal court. We just don't have a trial yet where a defendant has been convicted of genocide before the international criminal court, but I would suggest that time will arrive. You've noted that it's definitely become a use-co-jins and it's a norm, it's the worst type of crime. How do policymakers view that in light of the convention, the obligations of the convention, and the definition as they see it through the convention? There are instances today where leaders are clearly pretty oblivious to the crime of genocide. One is the Myanmar military regime. They have committed genocide against the Rohingya people who were ethnically cleansed across the border to Bangladesh, but with tactics that invoke the crime of genocide. The Chinese leadership is presumably oblivious to how they have treated the Uyghur minority population, the Muslim population in Western China, because they are crossing many of the red lines of genocide. Remember, genocide is not just mass killing. It's also creating the conditions of life that essentially bring a population's coherent existence to an end. It's dealing in ways that destroy the identity of a group, and that's what has been determined with respect to the Uyghurs. The Chinese leadership clearly doesn't see itself at liability in part because China is not a party to the international criminal court and therefore its leaders cannot be indicted by the international criminal court. The crime of genocide against the Uyghurs is not a transnational crime onto the territory of some other states, such as a state party to the ICC, which in Ukraine it is a problem because Russia is on the territory of a state that while it's not a party to the court has invited the court to have jurisdiction over Ukraine for these crimes. Then even we can take just a look at Nagorno-Korobakh, which is Armenia and Azerbaijan in September of 2023. The ethnic Armenian population in Nagorno-Korobakh, which is a region of Azerbaijan, was subject to months of starvation tactics to kind of starve it out, which Azerbaijan had imposed upon it. There were arguments being raised in August and early September of 2023 that, yeah, the red line was being passed on genocide because you're using starvation to basically eliminate this group. Even in a place like that, genocide was being discussed as a tactic. Then finally, Ukraine, many examples where you're having a direct assault against a civilian population with a lot of incitement language out of the leadership of Russia that could be identified with a criminal intent to essentially go after the civilian population of Ukraine and destroy at least a substantial part of it with all of these missile strikes constantly hitting the civilian neighborhoods of Ukrainian cities. What is that all about if it's not to get at a substantial part of the Ukrainian civilian population? If we have a genocide here show up on US soil tomorrow, from somewhere else in the world. They're not American, they're not American citizen, but they're here on US territory. Can they just live out their life in impunity? They're not supposed to. If we can identify them, and if we have some confidence in what the evidence is showing with respect to that person's conduct overseas, if that individual has committed genocide and decides to take the family for a vacation to Disney World or to buy some property in New Mexico and live happily ever after, there is a law, a federal law that enables the Department of Justice to indict that individual for the crime of genocide and to prosecute him and to convict him. It's one of those situations like terrorism where if you commit this heinous crime anywhere in the world and you think you're going to live comfortably in the United States, think again, we can prosecute you for committing genocide. The convention here is 75 years on and looking forward to a world where we have a lot, I think we have more armed conflict than we've had since the end of the Cold War. We have many wars that are in front and center of the media and in front of everybody's news, Ukraine included. How do you see the operation, the genocide convention, the crime of genocide going forward politically and for criminal accountability? What is the future of prosecution of this crime and prevention of this crime? Well, we've reached the stage now in world history where a crime like genocide is frankly so well known and so well understood by vast populations that civil society simply will not let genocide occur anywhere in the world without an enormous immediate response to it to put pressure on whatever government or non-state actor is responsible for perpetuating that genocide. There's no waiting period anymore. It's an instant reaction and that's very positive as a development. Civil society is sort of filling that alert vacuum that we used to have. Well, thank you very much, Ambassador Schiff, for so much. Thank you.