 I'm pleased to welcome all of you to the 35th Norris and Marjorie Bendenstein epic international symposium on preventing genocide and mass atrocities. I am Abbey Williams, director of the Institute for Global Leadership and professor of the practice of international politics at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. The symposium is organized by students in our flagship program, Education for Public Inquiry and International Citizenship Epic. It was originally shared in from March, but was postponed to October due to the coronavirus pandemic. Thanks to the magic of modern technology, this is the institute's first virtual epic symposium. The students have demonstrated remarkable creativity and adaptability in pivoting to a virtual format. I'm also pleased that 48 students from nine countries are participating in the symposium as part of IGL's leadership exchange program. A special welcome and thanks to our keynote speaker Ambassador David Schaefer and all our panelists who are joining us from far and near. We are grateful for your work in preventing atrocity crimes, whether as scholars, practitioners or activists. As old and new conflicts rage in various parts of the world, our work remains as necessary as ever. I'm delighted that today we will honor David with the Dr. Jean Maillard Global Citizenship Award in recognition of his sterling contributions to international criminal justice. We hope that his leadership in strengthening accountability for perpetrators of mass atrocities and seeking justice for their victims will inspire current and future tough students. I would like to express our profound appreciation to the President of Tufts, Tony Monaco, Provost Nadine Aubrey, Senior International Officer and Associate Provost Diana Shigas and Celia Campbell, Administrative Associate Provost for their support. Sincere thanks also to the Bendenzin family, especially Bobby and Joanne Bendenzin, their generous and steadfast friends of IGL and Tufts. I would also like to thank the IGL External Advisory Board for its active engagement and support. And finally, thank you to the IGL team, Heather Barry, Saida Abdullah, Stacey Kassakova and Keisha Kaneda for their hard work and dedication. The Institute for Global Leadership prepares new generations of critical thinkers who can provide the effective and ethical leadership needed to solve the world's most pressing problems. Our programs offer unique opportunities for tough students to make a difference in the world. Since the Holocaust, we've often repeated never again. But too often, the world has failed and is failing to prevent genocide or violence, making never again an empty slogan. It is right that we should focus on prevention. Given that prevention is, of course, the most economical, morally acceptable, and politically effective way of dealing with mass atrocities. And preventing genocide is achievable. Our panels and breakout discussions will address the multidimensional aspects of this critical issue, including the causes of genocide, early warning, prosecution and transitional justice, and memory and survival. It is our hope that this symposium can make an important contribution towards understanding why preventing genocide and mass atrocities is the highest priority and developing practical policy recommendations to enhance national and international capacities to respond to emerging threats of mass killings. We look forward to our discussions on this important issue today and tomorrow. Now I will ask Adam Foster, a member of the 2019 to 2020 epic class, to introduce my good friend, David Schiffa. Hello, everyone. Thank you for coming to the first ever virtual epic international symposium, preventing genocide and mass atrocities. We as a class have worked over the past year and a half to put this together. And though we have encountered several small setbacks and delays, including a minor global pandemic, we are eager to finally see our hard work through to completion and have spent many hours in committees and outside of class, organizing and planning this event across seven time zones. We are also especially grateful to Professor Williams and all of the staff at the IGL for working so diligently to put this together. Today, I have the honor of introducing our keynote speaker on behalf of the epic class of 2020. He's one of the foremost experts in the fields of international criminal law and international human rights, Professor David Schaffer. From 2006 through 2020, he was the Mayor Brown Robert A. Helman Professor of Law. And from 2006 to 2019, the director of the Center for International Human Rights at Northwestern University's Pritzker School of Law. He is now the clinical clinical professor emeritus and director emeritus of the Center for International Human Rights at the Law School. From 2012 to 2018, he was the UN Secretary General's special experts on UN assistance to the Khmer Rouge trials. Professor Schaffer was the first US ambassador at large for war crimes issues from 1997 to 2001 and led the US delegation to the UN talks establishing the International Criminal Court. He signed the Rome Statute of the ICC on behalf of the United States on December 31, 2000. He also negotiated the creation of five war crime tribunals and chaired the atrocities prevention interagency working group from 1998 to 2001. Mr. Schaffer is vice president of the American Society of International Law, a visiting senior fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Tom A. Bernstein Genocide Prevention Fellow at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. As such, today I have the honor of presenting Professor Schaffer with the 2020 Dr. Jean Maier Global Citizenship Award, which was established in 1993 in honor of Jean Maier, 10th president of Tufts University and presented to practitioners whose moral courage, personal integrity and passion for scholarship resonated his dictum that scholarship, research and teaching must be dedicated to solving the most pressing problems facing the world. The award itself we hope will be delivered by mail to you today. As for later, he will be speaking on why preventing atrocity crimes is the highest priority. Following his talk, he will answer questions from you, the audience, which you can put in the Q&A at the bottom of your screen. With that, I would like to turn the program over to Professor Schaffer and extend our heartfelt thanks for appearing before us and speaking today. Well, thank you to the Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts University and to Director Abby Williams for this exceptional opportunity to address a subject that has been part of my life and work for more than 30 years. And thanks to Adam Foster for that generous introduction. I am deeply honored and humbled to receive the 2020 Dr. Jean Maier Global Citizenship Award and will try my best to live up to its standards of character and scholarship and indeed it did arrive by UPS yesterday. I realize I am speaking today to a highly educated audience of scholars of law, international relations, genocide, and in particular the prevention of atrocity crimes. I look forward to absorbing all of the wisdom that the distinguished panelists today and tomorrow, many of whom I know, will convey to us. And I also express my greetings to all of the students who are joining us as well and will become our future scholars. I tailor my and practitioners. I tailor my remarks today towards reflections and proposals that I have made in prior years and which you might not have been aware of or fully absorbed in your research. I consider you my peers and far more knowledgeable in this discipline, but I hope I can bring a combination of my own scholarship, practitioner experience, and frankly vision to bear on the discussions that will ensue in this conference. I began by explaining the title of this keynote address. COVID-19 and its associated public health emergency, climate change, the rise of authoritarianism, massive refugee populations, the insidious assault on human rights, the economic recession imposing an unbearable hardship on hundreds of millions across the globe, all are of the highest priority. But so too are the continuing threat and reality of atrocity crimes. Governments, international organizations, particularly the United Nations, Simple Society, and the academic community must not let all of these other crises and challenges, each of the deserved prominence today, overwhelm the continuing importance of and focus on preventing atrocity crimes, vanquishing such violence when committed, and achieving accountability in the aftermath. To understand, we need only mention Syria, Yemen, the Rohingya of Myanmar, the Uighurs of China, victims throughout Central Africa, the tribes of Darfur, the oppressed of Venezuela, and the besieged in Ukraine. For if one tries to comprehend the larger realm of human suffering, the horror unleashed by genocide, crimes against humanity, large-scale war crimes, and aggression knows few parallels. Like all of the other crises we face today, atrocity crimes are phenomena conceived and perpetrated by humans who unquestionably hold the power of prevention. Everything, it seems, has changed, and yet nothing has changed. Preventing the commission of atrocity crimes remains among the highest priorities. There are four issues I want to briefly cover in this keynote address. First, over the last two decades, usage of the term atrocity crimes has taken hold at the United Nations and the International Criminal Court, among governments, scholars, NGOs, and the media. Atrocity crimes are genocide, crimes against humanity, serious war crimes, and in many ways aggression. When I introduced the term in 2001 in a law review article, I did so because of the failure of terminology during the 1990s when I served in the Clinton administration. Policymakers must act to prevent and repel atrocities quickly without waiting for legal advisors to determine whether or not the high bar of genocide, which is colossal and serious, but one of several types of crimes, has been achieved. Because what transpires in violence, burdened societies is not only genocide, but also crimes against humanity, war crimes, and aggression. And all of these crimes deserve high priority attention by policy makers as they loom on the horizon or immediately when they break out, regardless of precise definitions. So I had an agenda to level the playing field and in fact focus on prevention. Regardless of how tribunals and scholars ultimately define the category of crime involved in any particular act or conflict, policymakers must react in real time to prevent the commencement or continuation of such crimes. And they must recognize that such violence is potentially criminal. Make no mistake, complicity in the commission of atrocity crimes can include the failure to prevent them when an official or a government knows of the circumstances unfolding and yet fails to act. I think of Syria and Yemen in this respect. So act one must, as a policy maker, using the term atrocity crimes without getting bogged down in whether it is genocide or crimes against humanity or war crime should be enough to trigger decision making on prevention. Be it diplomacy, sanctions, litigation, or the positioning of military assets or even armed intervention. Granted, the term genocide can be extremely powerful and I have championed using it for the Rohingya today in my efforts with several NGOs and in connection with the case before the International Court of Justice. In part to galvanize international action with determinations that draw upon best estimates of what has actually happened. I know Professor John Packers in the audience and he has been so influential on the Rohingya matter but so much of my own engagement is after the fact of the massive assault on the Rohingya in 2017 and it is important to note that contemporary efforts also are focused on prevention of further genocide. Prior to August 2017, policymakers should have been seized more prominently with the prospect and sometimes reality of atrocity crimes against the Rohingya and they should have sought to prevent the worst outcome. Governments failed the Rohingya prior to August 2017 and it is incumbent upon them not to fail the Rohingya now. Second, several years ago I began to focus on the actual costs of prevention of atrocity crimes in comparison to the enormous expense arising from the failure to prevent atrocities including the actual financial burden of the atrocities when they occur and the astronomical monetary and non-monetary costs associated with the restoration of devastated societies victimized by atrocity crimes. We need to make progress in determining how costly atrocities actually are in terms of human lives, in the viability of economic well-being, in the cultural and intellectual fiber of society and in the moral compass of peoples. Without this knowledge, policymakers are deprived of the critical data they need to understand the consequences of their inaction with respect to atrocities. The range of costs needs to take into account not only the heterogeneity of different atrocity scenarios but also that prevention can be promoted through a wide range of investments in societies at risk. What would be the most effective investment strategies for the cost determination methodology of preventive measures? The first category of cost of prevention should entail research into fairly predictable areas of budgeting such as cost relating to UN peacekeeping or coalition military deployments, economic sanctions, economic development and humanitarian assistance, and the cost of promoting democratic institutions and the rule of law. Importantly, such calculations should distinguish between the costs of indicators of atrocities, namely long-term trends that raise grave concerns and similar costing calculations for precursors of atrocities, which are the immediate threatening signals that violence is imminent. The goal would be to determine the cost of monitoring and responding to such indicators and precursors for the purpose of ultimately resolving the threats before mass atrocities erupt. The second category would be the actual costs of atrocities, assuming they are not prevented and thus their impact on society. These costs include the loss of human life, the infliction of injuries on thousands, mental illness and post-traumatic stress disorder, the loss of earning capacity for impacted families, the destruction of the judicial sector and educational systems, the devastation of property associated with victims of the atrocities, destruction of cultural monuments and sites, the costs of massive refugee flows and the cost of moral decay within the affected societies. There is an additional dimension to the cost of atrocities constituting the third category that typically has not been accounted for in conventional thinking, namely the funding required for restoration in the aftermath of atrocities, which can far exceed the financial burdens under the first and second categories. The past value of what is destroyed during atrocities is far less than what would take in human and financial resources to rebuild devastated societies, typically over decades. The cost of restoration includes the current and higher market value of rebuilding homes and businesses, of meeting the medical needs physical and mental, of perhaps millions of survivor victims for decades, of restoring judicial and governmental institutions and cultural sites over many years, of returning refugees to their communities or assuring their livelihoods elsewhere, and of rebuilding the society's infrastructure, energy, transportation, hospitals, schools. My hope is that the day will arrive where in the situation room of the White House, when a potential atrocity crime situation is discussed at the table, policymakers would be presented with a financial estimation report comparing the cost of prevention with that of actual commission of atrocities and of restoration. Once confronted with those three categories of estimated costs, policymakers might be more inclined to deliberate about steps to prevent atrocity crimes rather than procrastinate and confront them in real time or restore the devastation left behind. The moral dimension of preventing atrocity crimes of course remains paramount, but the raw calculation of the financial impact leads to a more effective, but if the raw calculation of the financial impact leads to a more effective atrocity prevention strategy, then I am all for it. Third, I co-authored a book chapter for a volume edited by Professor Leila Sadat several years ago. My co-author and I argue in that book chapter that new paradigms for using military force to prevent or repel atrocity crimes should be examined. The book chapter essentially picks up and expands upon the thesis I advanced 30 years ago in my law review article entitled, Toward a Modern Doctrine of Humanitarian Intervention. Now, much has transpired since then. The current regime of law based on the UN Charter and the Responsibility to Protect principle, however, has been disappointing in achieving the goal of preventing atrocities. Of course, there is scant political sentiment anymore in this country or abroad as far as I can determine to realistically implement the responsibility to protect. And this despite the rhetorical support many governments express for it in the annual General Assembly debate and despite the valiant support of civil society, including one of my favorite NGOs, the Global Center for the Responsibility to Protect. The first paradigm in the book chapter examines four UN Charter provisions and practices, namely the possibility of a political agreement to effectively overcome the veto power held by the permanent members of the Security Council when humanitarian crises arise, reactivating the United for Peace resolution, resorting more frequently to UN peacekeeping forces under chapter six and a half authority for humanitarian action, and negotiating article 43 standby agreements between member states and the Security Council. The second paradigm explores a more pragmatic and hence expansive interpretation of articles two sub paragraph four and 51 of the UN Charter and the customary law right of individual and collective self-defense. This paradigm grounded in the UN Charter and customary international law would enable a more effective application of the use of military force in the face of humanitarian debacles, whether driven by atrocity crimes or by other repressive assaults or natural calamities. The third paradigm reaches beyond conventional UN Charter theory to recognize what we term as the exhaustion principle, namely a situation where UN Charter procedures are exhausted and the humanitarian situation remains dire. A military intervention launched under foreign territory where the humanitarian crisis is erupting but where UN Charter authorization, literal or interpretive remains absent is a gamble under the law. It may however actually find a basis in customary international law where human rights principles can influence the morality if not legality of the initiative, thereby leading to the acquiescence of other nations. These paradigms could establish the basis for a new doctrine of humanitarian intervention in the 21st century. One can envision all of them working together as a framework for action where one paradigm may fail in a particular situation and other paradigm might replace depending on the circumstances of the humanitarian peril and the all-important question, if not now, when. As a strong believer in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, I nonetheless am concerned about how to advance the law of humanitarian intervention in light of the crime of aggression now embedded in the Rome Statute. The definitions for the crime of aggression and an act of aggression set forth in Article 8 bis of the Rome Statute do not envision the legality of humanitarian interventions falling outside of Security Council authorization under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter unless one occurs squarely within the inherent right of self-defense without triggering a manifest violation of the UN Charter. The introduction of the operative crime of aggression to the Rome Statute thus may create a new and daunting disincentive for any nation considering how it might respond to a serious humanitarian situation that is a compelling one for military intervention. There will be some countries that will not be subject to the International Criminal Court's scrutiny of their leaders for the crime of aggression. They will be non-party states and states parties that have opted out of liability for the crime. But for those countries that ratify the amendment for the crime of aggression and embrace its coverage, the prospect of persuading such governments to step up to the challenge of a military intervention for humanitarian purposes likely will be undercut by the Rome Statute's operational coverage of aggression. One way to overcome this problem would be to amend the Rome Statute's definition of an act of aggression so that it explicitly excludes, quote, acts that are in exercise of the right of self-defense under Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations or of the responsibility to protect under United Nations General Assembly resolution 6-1 paragraphs 138 to 139 of 24 October 2005. Close quote. Although this would not cover the exhaustion principle we've argued in our book chapter, at least it would undeniably recognize the legality of self-defense and R2P grounds for a forcible humanitarian intervention and thus exclude individual criminal responsibility from the normative framework of the crime of aggression when armed force is used for these purposes. My fourth and final point is that the United States Congress has been relatively busy on the atrocity prevention front in recent years. I count at least six laws within the last three years that bear upon atrocity prevention including the prospect of accountability for atrocity crimes already committed. The new laws bearing upon accountability send a strong message of deterrence and hence potentially of prevention. The most relevant law is the L.A. Viesel Genocide and Atrocities Prevention Act of 2018 which places the prevention of atrocities squarely in the national interest and stipulates a bureaucratic and reporting regime that should keep the U.S. government informed and incentivize officials to engage with allies and others to prevent atrocities. Other laws include the Iraq and Syria Genocide Relief and Accountability Act of 2018, the Caesar-Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019, the Saudi Arabia Accountability and Yemen Act of 2019, the sanctioning the use of civilians as defenseless Shields Act of 2018, and the Uighur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020. The Uighur law imposes property blocking and visa blocking sanctions on individuals and entities identified as responsible for human rights abuses in China's Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. It requires the president to report to Congress on human rights abuses in that region, efforts to protect ethnic Uighurs and Chinese nationals in the United States from intimidation by the Chinese government and the Chinese technological developments that are enabling mass surveillance and internment. And I note that in April 2019, for the first time in history, both houses of the U.S. Congress passed war powers legislation, which called for an end to U.S. involvement in the war in Yemen. However, it was subsequently vetoed by President Trump. Next year, regardless of who occupies the White House, I want to finish a 12-year journey to see the U.S. Congress pass and the president sign a Crimes Against Humanity Act. This has been an impunity gap in U.S. law that I've written about, and it is legislation I have been associated with for more than a decade. I happen to chair the American Bar Association Center for Human Rights Working Group on Crimes Against Humanity for this express purpose. It is a bill originally sponsored by Senator Dick Durbin at Illinois and Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont in June 2009. The time has arrived for it to become law, and both senators will remain in the U.S. Senate next year. So the mission for 2021, and I invite any and all of you to join in this quest, is to realize the enactment of a law that would empower federal courts to prosecute crimes against humanity, including by foreigners who fall within U.S. jurisdiction. That would be one more deterrent to the commission of atrocity crimes. Recall that years ago, U.S. law was amended to facilitate the prosecution of genocide and war crimes, and now we must add crimes against humanity, as so many other countries have done in the last couple of decades. So thank you for this opportunity to speak today about these issues, and now I am open to the questions. Over to you, Adam. Thank you again, Professor Schaefer. We're truly grateful for your remarks today. And with that, I will open the floor to questions from the audience. As a reminder, you can input your questions at the bottom of your screen. I will attempt to get to all of them, but please be patient. The first question comes from a member of the Epic 2019-2020 class, a personal friend, Julia Schufro. What are your thoughts on the doctrine of R2P? It ideally catalyzes international action to become preventive, to become prevention instead of response, and theoretically it normalizes human rights as superior to national interest and Westphalian sovereignty. That being said, it has not been invoked in the face of repressive assaults and atrocity crimes recently. Well, I have a lot of thoughts about R2P, and I'll try my best to make this very short. I've written a lot about what technically, technically R2P is, so that we don't fool ourselves into thinking that it is in fact more than it really is. It depends on the very exact wording of the outcome statement in 2005, which ties R2P not only to a general principle of governments ensuring that they protect their own populations, and that was a very important part of R2P, to have governments do the work they're supposed to do internally without external interference, but that if that fails, and there is a perception in the international community that it has failed, then there is a procedure within the Security Council by which to respond to that, as well as at their invitation to help these governments if they so wish. That final hammer, which is in paragraph 139 of the statement, is very directly tied to atrocity crimes, and to the determination, frankly, by somebody in the end by the Security Council, that atrocity crimes have actually been and are being committed. So that's a hurdle right there, diplomatically, is making that determination, and for the Security Council to have, frankly, the guts to make that determination. A political minefield, given the relationships among various permanent members, as well as non-permanent members in the Security Council. So ultimately, in order to achieve a Chapter 7 endpoint intervention, if that is required, and if all of the sort of altruistic procedures prior to that moment, if they can be achieved, great, so rarely are they achieved. If they cannot be achieved, then the question is getting the Security Council approval, and that has proven very, very difficult procedurally to achieve. Where procedure fails, substance also fails, because at that point, then the responsibility to protect principle has collapsed. It cannot be followed through on. It's dependent upon the Security Council, and that Security Council, of course, has both Russia and China on it, and even within the last three or four years, you would have to say, and by the way, it also has the United States on it with respect to any willingness by the United States to project itself internationally to protect civilian populations at risk. Of course, there is this effort afoot, which I made note of in that book chapter I was talking about, of trying to avoid the veto situation and humanitarian situations. Of course, it's futile so far. It's a nice theoretical argument. There's a great book by Jennifer Trehan of New York Law School out on it recently on how to try to think through that proposition, but I think it's just going to be very, very difficult. So what is the future of R2P? Well, I think there still should be a future. I think we should just keep banging away for it, but we should be realistic in not overestimating its ability to turn the tide. Thank you, Professor. The next question also has to do with R2P, and I believe you might have answered this in your previous response. So if you just want to say I've already answered this or just reiterate, that's totally fine too. Despite the economic, social, and moral logic of preventing mass atrocity events before they happen, it seems like there are still reticence to intervene. Is this due to concerns about respecting state sovereignty, setting precedents that state aren't willing to uphold vis-a-vis future R2P, concerns about triggering proxy wars, or some other reason in your professional opinion? Well, it could, you know, it can include all of what you just stated, but I think it's also just, quite frankly, domestic politics. I mean, there's very little appetite domestically. Certainly here in the United States, but I think you could also associate this with many other governments around the world. Very little appetite to commit one's soldiers and the lives of one's soldiers to a foreign intervention that is not directly relevant to one's national security interests has not been embraced formally in the Security Council with a Chapter 7 resolution, Enforcement Resolution, by the Security Council itself. If you're acting outside of that parameter, you're in a much, much more difficult scenario of action. But I do think one needs to look at, and I actually am serious about this, in terms of scholarship. Boy, do we empirically need studies? Maybe they're out there and I'm just not aware of it. Empirically, you need to have a much better understanding of why the citizens of nations, which might not be directly involved with the humanitarian catastrophe happening halfway around the world, why citizens place such a restraint on their own governments to act, because the leaders understand that this is not going to be popular, that it doesn't have popular support. Boy, I've been reading recently about the domestic situation here in the United States prior to the U.S. entry into World War II. And it was totally on the other side until Pearl Harbor was hit, which was a national security event for the United States. And it's remarkable how resistant the public is to using your military capabilities to help another civilian population at risk. It's remarkable. And I hope there's, I mean, maybe it's out there and I'm just not aware, but I would really encourage more scholarship in that field. Thank you. And the next question comes from an anonymous attendee. What do you think can and should happen with regard to the Rohingya crisis and what is happening in Xinjiang, aside from the bill recently passed by the U.S. Congress? Well, on the Rohingya, we currently, I mean, there are many things that should be done. Two are in process. One is the case at the International Court of Justice brought by the Gambia and joined by a couple of other countries, including Canada, recently. And I actually was, I thought a bold move by the United States would be to join the Gambia in the case at the International Court of Justice. Let's shake things up and show the clout of the United States in that case. But of course, that was futile. But that is a very important case. It is ongoing. It'll take several years. And so, therefore, it doesn't have the immediate, it has, it has, it has some preventive character to it, obviously. The Myanmar government has to pay attention to what it is doing on the ground because it's under scrutiny at the International Court of Justice. But one thing which I and I think this is open to scholarship by any of you students for a thesis or paper or something is I just wish the International Court of Justice would make more use of its statutory power to investigate as opposed to just sitting there and receiving information. In other words, to be more proactive in investigating a situation, particularly the Rohingya, which is ongoing. It's not some historical event only. It's ongoing. It requires more investigation and not just the judges sitting there waiting for information to come to them. And so, I really wish that would happen at the International Court of Justice. And then secondly, there's the case at the International Criminal Court, which is different. It's not a genocide case. Remember the ICJ case is only about genocide against the Rohingya period, not about crimes against humanity, not about war crimes, only genocide because it's the genocide convention, which is on deck before the ICJ. What's on deck before the ICC is the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and its jurisdictional regime. And that, that means that we're looking now, or not we, but the International Criminal Court is looking at the crime of forcible deportation onto Bangladesh territory of the Rohingya population. And Bangladesh is a state party to the ICC. So they have seized jurisdiction based upon the, that basis. So those two things are going on. But at the same time, there's the third prong, which is diplomacy for all of you students in international relations. Man, is this, this is classic challenge number one. What can be done diplomatically with the Myanmar government and its patron saint China to turn the tide and create a better scenario for the Rohingya in Myanmar, as well as getting them back to Myanmar from Bangladesh, from the refugee camps. That's diplomacy. That's hard work. Now there are sanctions involved right now, but I mean, the various governments, including the United States have imposed, but that is the challenge. And, and I think that's an amazingly important challenge is the one of diplomacy right now. Thank you. This is a another question from another epic member, a good friend of mine, Connor Elliott. Professor, you've spoken at length about the responsibilities of the United States in particular with regards to the prevention of atrocity crimes. Given that R2P places the onus of prevention on the international community as a whole, do you believe that other states share this responsibility? And if so, how should they go about fulfilling it? Yes, a very strong yes. And of course, they can go about doing it without the United States, if the United States is the reluctant partner. But it's an interesting question. I mean, it's one of strategizing how do you build a mindset among your colleagues in other governments, including foreign ministries. Remember, foreign ministries are always the first to sort of, you know, back off and be very protective and don't take bold actions. I say this because I was in the State Department for eight years. I saw it every day at the table. And it was the quest of Ambassador Albright under her leadership and me as her staffer to kind of break through that resistance that one so often has in a State Department environment or a foreign ministry environment to actually act. And that's why if one could change things and have a State Department and a foreign ministry, whereby individuals, the leaders within and the staffers within are actually seeking to achieve objectives rather than always trying to find, well, sure, I can object to this because I can point out five different reasons why this is not going to be good or we should be restrained, we should be conservative, we shouldn't put anything at risk. Yeah, I mean, frankly, I guess I don't want to get too much into the psychology of these things, but I witnessed it for a long time. It's easy to come into a policy room and be the grenade thrower. The easiest thing in the world. I can come in and think of 10 reasons why not to do something. It's easy. And it always sort of promotes you as, oh yeah, that's the smart skeptic at the table. It's a lot harder to come into the conference room and advocate for action and rebut all of those skeptical statements and bat away all of those grenades. So I speak particularly to the students, you have to develop a mindset of how do you persuade and that includes getting back to your question, how to develop a strategy with other foreign ministries. When we were developing a war crimes strategy in the Clinton administration under First Ambassador and then Secretary of State Albright's leadership, I literally had to fly around the world and walk into foreign ministries and persuade them to act in unison with us to build war crimes tribunals. And you have to just develop a strategy. And I would hope that there's an R2P strategy that is someday actually developed and implemented. Thank you. This is a little bit out of the previous subjects previously mentioned, but this question is, Professor, how do you evaluate and address Armenian assertions that Azerbaijan and Turkey are attempting to commit genocide in the current fighting? Well, that's a great question. I've actually been looking at that over the last week. I'm with the Council on Foreign Relations and we have a lot coming out on that issue, so it's been sort of prominent in my thinking. That's a tough question because one has to recognize that back in the early 1990s under Armenian support, Nagorno-Karabakh was seized. The territory was actually seized from Azerbaijan under Armenian government support and then sort of a very Armenian sympathetic local government in Nagorno-Karabakh. So from Azerbaijan's point of view, this is seized territory. So from their point of view, that's a violation of international law. From Armenia's point of view, of course, there's also a vast violation of international law, which is the human rights integrity of the majority Armenian ethnic population in Nagorno-Karabakh and the principle of self-determination, which is in their view, under assault. I don't know if the facts on the ground are literally of genocide character today in terms of the Azerbaijan and military attack on Nagorno-Karabakh territory and its population at this time. And remember, Turkey is also involved in this with respect to Azerbaijan, and that brings back memories of the genocide of the Armenians back in the early 20th century. So there's a lot going on there. But I don't know if I would conclude at this moment that Armenia is correct in saying that there's a genocidal assault on the Armenian ethnic population in Nagorno-Karabakh. I would certainly say that we've got a lot of war crimes taking place. We've got aggression taking place. And we may have some crimes against humanity, but of course, I would just say, yeah, there's a lot of atrocity crimes going on. We've got to stop this now. And it's not really a military intervention issue at this point in my view, but by God, it's a diplomatic issue. And there has to be a lot of diplomacy brought to bear immediately from the UN, from the United States government telling Turkey back off and also telling Russia to get the heck out of the way and let diplomacy work. That's unless Russia is sincerely there in a diplomatic way, that's a little hard to say right now. But I'm afraid that's kind of my thought flow right now on the corner of Bak. Thank you. The next question is, how do you make the practical case for morality in U.S. foreign policy, especially when it may be inconsistently applied? Well, yes, historically, it has been very inconsistently applied. If one means by asking that, you know, at what point has our foreign policy been moral in its content? And at what time has it been immoral? And I think that's a long historical discussion going back hundreds of years, quite frankly, in the experience of America and even colonial America and the fate of the, you know, Native Americans and also the fate of what we describe now as African Americans, but of course the whole slavery issue and our relationship with Africa at that time. So yeah, this is a huge long discussion. But in terms of the future and morality, I think we need to, you know, kind of have a nice, I don't know, word nice isn't correct. We need to have a robust discussion in the foreign policy community and then link it to the broader public of the United States about moral principles at stake and in the execution of our foreign policy. And one thing that I would look at in framing that discussion would be the use coach's principles of international law, that that's kind of a foundation of morality. And it's one that links us to the rest of the world. And we need to understand that better. You know, I always, I mean, I went on record years ago in my book, All the Missing Souls in 2012, you know, I made it very clear that I had strong objections to this argument that the United States should advertise itself as exceptional, that we are, that this theory of exceptionalism somehow defines American foreign policy. Please, we have to get beyond that. The rest of the world does not buy that at all. It's an it's an obstacle to communication with the rest of the world. We need a foreign policy for the future, particularly after the last four years, four years, I shouldn't say four years after the last four years, that or three and a half years, that is a foreign policy of not immediately trying to seize leadership. Because believe me, I know enough about, I'm in touch with a lot of people around the world, they're not looking for our leadership per se at this moment, because that's cratered. That has cratered. What they're looking for is collaboration, come back to the table, collaborate with us. It's not really partnership, it's collaboration. Sit at the table, be part of the UN dialogue, be part of the UN's agencies, collaborate, and use the strength of your economy, the strength of your military to be an honest collaborator with us. Because we have experienced what leadership, we need, we've had to fill sort of the void of leadership in the last three and a half years. So countries like Germany and France, they're kind of in a leadership mindset right now. So I don't think we should come back to the table and say, oh, well, we're now leading. That's not what they want, but collaboration absolutely. Thank you. For our second to last question, we are running a little bit out of time, so I apologize. Having been the UN advisor on the trials in Cambodia, how would you judge the ability of the trials to render justice and or promote reconciliation? Yeah, well, it's a mixed picture. And I have no regrets about spending the time that I did in creating the extraordinary chambers in the courts of Cambodia and being so deeply involved over the last two decades in the work product of that tribunal. Yeah, there have been some setbacks. There hasn't been a follow-through, I should say, on the interpretation of the constitutional documents of that court that I had hoped would happen, particularly by the Cambodian government and by the Cambodian judges. Nonetheless, verdicts have been rendered. An enormous body of evidence has been collected that will stand the test of time over history. Scholars have so much to look at now with respect to what happened during the Pol Pot regime that they never would have had without the existence of that tribunal. And top leaders have been brought to justice. The very latest developments at the court have been a bit discouraging, in fact, quite discouraging because they imperil follow-through on cases three and four. And that's unfortunate, but an enormous effort was made to achieve international justice as well as domestic justice at the Khmer Rouge tribunals. And I think in the test of history, they will be seen as it's far better that they that they held these trials, that they reached the verdicts that they did, that the evidence was compiled that was compiled, that the precedence for international criminal law established in so many of the judgments of that court will stand the test of time and already have been used by other tribunals in referencing the rationales developed at the extraordinary chambers in the context of international criminal law. So there's a very rich body there. And I do hope that it still has a future. When I was a special expert for the UN, that was my job. And we kept it going from 2012 to 2018 when I then left. And there is no special expert now for that court. I think there should be. But nonetheless, I do hope it can continue to adjudicate cases three and four to their conclusion. Thank you. And for our final question, thank you, Professor Schaefer. My question is, your experience and scholarship with the UN and the international system has seen many changes of the UN SG administration and the country delegates. How has the UN changed since when you first joined it? What challenges have arisen that you never anticipated? And finally, do you have any advice for students who wish to join this field? Well, boy, that requires a big think. How has the UN changed over 30 years? Y'all, sure, I can tell you that. I mean, in the 1990s, we were very, we were, we had a lot of experiences with the UN in the US government during the 1990s, but we were very hopeful and enthused with UN participation with the potential of the Security Council to engage on tough issues. And it did at times during the 1990s. We sometimes had difficulty with the UN on the ground in Bosnia in terms of what we call the dual key thing and, you know, using air power to actually discipline the process. But we used it a lot to, I think, very good purpose in the 1990s. Obviously, the downslide occurred during the first decade of the 21st century and Iraq is the classic example. And yet, and then I'm just, you know, during the Obama administration years, it was a fairly mixed picture with the UN in terms of its performance. And then I would just say that in recent years, I actually have tended myself, given the assaults, you know, the critical assaults on the UN and its efforts, I've tended to sort of push back and say, wait a minute, you know, you're just not recognizing the role of the United Nations in the modern world and the great utility of various UN agencies that must be supported. It was fantastic this morning that the World Food Program got the Nobel Peace Prize. Good for them, good for them. And if the current US administration does not praise that to the heavens, then shame on them. Because good for them. The World Food Program has been on the frontline of human misery for decades and they must be there. And the United States has been its largest financial supporter and it must continue to be. So there are aspects of the UN of that character, which are I think great. Now I will just say, since this is a scholarly community listening, I do think that there is a need to modernize our interpretation of the UN Charter. It's a very challenging task, but we need to modernize how we interpret the words of each clause of the UN Charter so that the UN can be far more effective, provide far more utility to the great challenges that confront us in the world today. Thank you so much professor. I apologize to the members of the audience that I did not get the chance to talk to or answer their questions. But if you would like, you can ask these questions to different panelists outside and I will post the schedule for the other remaining panels for the rest of our symposium in the chat. Thank you all for coming and participating in this symposium. Thank you in particular to our keynote speaker, David Schaefer. If you wish to come to our other panels again, I will post the symposium schedule as well as the other panelists' attendees in the link in the chat. Thank you so much. Thank you.