 I've been the Chief Executive of the International Rescue Committee for about six years now. We're a team of about 30,000 employees and volunteers in 40 countries, 200 field sites around the world. And I have one fear above all others. It's the fear that I get a call telling me that one of my staff members has been killed in the line of duty. And that fear I'm afraid is happening more often. And what I want to talk about today is why it's happening and what we can do about it. The war in Syria is emblematic of the work that we do. We work in the northwest of the country in Idlib, where there is bombing happening today. And we work in the northeast of the country. My colleagues provide emergency cash assistance, child protection, health services, actually some education and employment services as well. Two of my colleagues are on the screen behind me. Mohammed Mishnan and Fadi Alamar. Mohammed was a 29-year-old paramedic and Fadi, a 34-year-old ambulance driver. Both were supported by my organisation and by our partner, the Syrian American Medical Society, to work in Idlib province. Their job was to treat civilians who were wounded in the fighting. In August last year, they were called to help some civilians. Above them, high in the sky, was a Russian fighter plane. That plane sent a precisely targeted missile at the well-marked ambulance that was being driven and killed both of those colleagues of mine. Welcome to the age of impunity. Welcome to an age also when Saudi Arabia bombs a school coach in Yemen, killing 43 children. When units allied to the Myanmar armed forces drive 745,000 Rohingya Muslims out of Myanmar and into Bangladesh as refugees. And when terrorist groups like Boko Haram Islamic State in northeast Nigeria tyrannised civilians and prevent over a million people from receiving any humanitarian aid at all. There are three points that I really want you to take away from the discussion today. The first is that the age of impunity is here and that it's dangerous. The second is that the retreat from the rule of law, which is what the age of impunity represents, shouldn't just be a cause for NGOs, it should also be the business of business. And thirdly, that with governments in retreat from big global problems, it's up to NGOs and the business community to step up and find solutions. You know the phrase, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts, absolutely. That's the danger that we're facing today. That outrages like the bombing of an ambulance become precedent and then precedent becomes a norm. After the Second World War, the phrase never again was used, not just in respect of the Holocaust, but also in respect of the failure of international governance in between the wars that created the conditions in which the Second World War and all its horrors happened. And the pioneering leaders of that era, that post-war era recognised that where there is no flaw under the protection of the most vulnerable, there is no limit to the abuse of power by the most powerful. That led to an unprecedented set of rights being granted to individuals, rights that sat alongside the rights of states that had underpinned international relations for three centuries. And while the post-war order never fully lived up to its lofty ambitions, it did usher in a period of unprecedented expansion of rights, of economic prosperity, of democratic advance, which all of us in one way or another benefit from. What I want to put to you today is the checks that were written in 1945 to the most vulnerable in the world, checks marked international humanitarian law, checks marked rights of civilians. Those checks are bouncing. The most basic rights are under threat. Here's a slide which shows you attacks only on health facilities and what you see as an appalling trend, a thousand attacks on health facilities, on hospitals, on health workers, more than 250 in Syria alone. It's not just health workers who are under attack. This is a slide showing you attacks on health, on aid workers. 120 aid workers killed on average in the last five years, more than double the average 15 years before. 139 of my colleagues killed last year. Ethnic cleansing on the rise, far from never again, 11 cases last year compared to three in 2005. Of course the greatest harm and danger to the most vulnerable, to the 140 million children living in areas of high intensity conflict. All of this producing the greatest wave of forced displacement since records began, refugees and the internally displaced, people who are being driven from their homes by fear, by conflict and by persecution. What you'll see in the blue bars are the number of the internally displaced. Those people forced from their homes, not for economic reasons, but for a conflict or persecution, but remaining within their own country. In the orange chart, the number of refugees and asylum seekers, 70 million people in total, one in every 110 people on the planet, forced from their homes by conflict or by persecution. That is the age of impunity. It goes, and the law is for suckers. A time when war crimes go unpunished and the laws of war become optional. A time when militaries, militias and mercenaries in conflicts around the world believe that they can get away with anything and because they believe they can get away with anything, they do everything. Chemical weapons, cluster bombs, landmines, bombing of school buses, besiegement of cities, blocking of humanitarian supplies, targeting of journalists and aid workers, you name it, we're seeing it, we're seeing more of it and the reason I'm giving this talk, we're seeing less outrage about it and less accountability for it. I just want to take a short detour to examine how did we get here? How have we ended up in a situation where 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, 30 years after the end of the Cold War, off from an age of accountability, we're seeing an age of impunity? I think there are four drivers that you have to have in mind, four reasons that this is happening. The first is that there's a shift in the balance of power in the world and often that's described as a shift in the balance of economic power from west to east, which is happening. Often it's described as a shift from a unipolar world order to a multipolar world order, that is also happening. We're also seeing a shift in the balance of power between liberal democracies and autocratic regimes. Last year was the first year in 120 years when the GDP of countries that are democracies was less than the GDP of autocracies, more than 50% of global GDP now coming from undemocraticly governed countries. The second, and by the way, if you want an emblem of the shift in the balance of political power, remember the picture of President Putin and Crown Prince bin Salman high-fiving at the G20 summit in Argentina a few weeks after the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Second reason, the countries of liberal democracy, the countries like the ones that I come from, haven't set a good enough example. Civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan have given false promise, false permission to other actors to do the same. And when the language of human rights is corroded in western in liberal democratic foreign policy, it's a short cut to others following suit. Third, the age of impunity has also been driven by non-state actors, by organisations like Daesh, like Boko Haram, who never signed Geneva Conventions, unlike states, but who nonetheless are obliged to follow the rules of the Geneva Convention, but do not, and that in turn has given an excuse to some states to argue that they should have to use the same tactics in reply. Fourth, the age of impunity abroad has fed off the retreat of democratic governance at home. 113 countries have seen what's called democratic recession over the last 13 years, reductions in political freedom. Now, these four trends are deep trends that go to the heart of the global compact on which the international system is built. And they weaken at every stage the institutions, the laws and the norms on which accountability rests. And this leads to my next point. Don't believe that the rule of law will be sacrosanct in economics if it's weak in politics. The business of business has to include the defence of the rule of law, not just for moral reasons, but for reasons of interest, and I want to highlight two. First, when the rule of law is meaningless in the most fundamental aspects of politics, it's a short jump to it being overridden in economics. When power is not accountable in matters of life and death, it's all too easy for it to become optional in more mundane matters of dollars and cents. Countries which sneer at human rights are usually also a threat to property rights. And the second reason is that the global problems being addressed here in Davos are complex and long-term climate change protection from pandemics. But if we cannot protect the most basic foundation of the international system, the right to life of civilians in war zones, how on earth are we going to tackle the more complex and challenging problems of climate change and pandemics? And with government in retreat, my case is that it's for NGOs and the corporate sector to step up with solutions. We need to use our voice, we need to use our resources, and we need to use our experience. I want to highlight five things that we can do other than the most obvious, which is that obviously I want every business represented here in Davos to become a supporter of the International Rescue Committee. I want them to build on the good example of the really pioneering practice that we're able to achieve. Just one example, with Microsoft, with Google and with Cisco, we've created the world's first information platform, trusted information platform for refugees. Over a million refugees have now used that on arriving in Europe. It's called Signpost. But here are five things that I think we need to work on together. The first is that we need to get the facts out. We need to do a much better job in helping civilians in war zones and journalists who are trying to report on them cover abuses of international humanitarian law. Thank goodness the New York Times and the Syrian Human Rights Observatory have detailed the bombings in Syria. No one else has. We need the tech companies to help make it easier for citizens and citizen journalists to safely record and disseminate information on what is going on around them. And the moment governments around the world want to shut down the internet, which happened 200 times last year, is the moment we need the tech companies to ensure access. Second, we need to worry the military commanders. We need them to have in their minds that they will be accountable for their actions. Thank goodness for the German NGO, the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights, who filed a criminal lawsuit against Syrian war criminals. No one else has done that. We should be calling on governments to use the Magnitsky Act to sanction those who abuse international humanitarian law. Third, we need to hold our own governments to account. We need governments which say they support international humanitarian law to do so. I was impressed when I heard that American Airlines had refused permission to the US government to transport immigrations and customs enforcement detainees on their flights when they hadn't been through the proper processes of law. I'd love to see the entire arms industry refuse to service missile systems if they are used to target civilians. I'd even more love to see the financial services industry say it won't support any arms manufacturer who refuses to sign up to that global standard. Fourthly, we need inquiries into abuses of international humanitarian law with teeth and there's a really important test case coming out. The UN has announced that it is an inquiry into the bombing of only seven hospitals in Syria. But as of now, we haven't yet got a commitment that the inquiry will be published or that the inquiry will hold accountable, will point the finger at those responsible. Fourthly and fifthly, we need a self-denying ordinance. No more virtue signalling. We need to learn to last the pace, not just to signal virtue. It's good that many of the companies represented here in Davos refused to attend the Davos in the desert a few weeks after the killing of Jamal Kochogi. It's not good that a year later they did attend that conference without any progress on accountability for that crime. If companies are going to make a stand, if anyone's going to make a stand, they've got to be ready to last the pace because it's almost better not to make the stand than to only do so temporarily and then to retreat before there is proper accountability. I want to end where I began with two aid workers going about their business. This is a picture of the ambulance that was being driven by Mohammed and Fadi, my two colleagues, working in north-west Syria. You can see how there was absolutely no chance for them to survive. Now, that is the symbol of a liberal international order, a rules-based international order becoming less liberal, less international, and less orderly. And there is now an alternative future in view. It's in the future that the Israeli author Yuval Harari calls a network of fortresses in which different countries have their own defences and their own rules. I don't want to live in that kind of world that is even less liberal, even less international, and even less orderly. Mohammed and Fadi, my two colleagues, were powerless, unarmed and powerless in the face of the might of the military machine around them. But we are not powerless. It's on us to establish accountability for the powerful and turn the tide on the age of impunity. And we need the help of all those represented here to achieve that. The ambulance that Mohammed and Fadi road has been destroyed, as you saw. But today, the International Rescue Committee has more than a dozen ambulances working in the northwest of Syria. We have 20 health facilities operating in the northwest of Syria, and 300 staff continuing their mission every day. If you believe that Mohammed and Fadi should not die in vain and want to create accountability for the most powerful, then I hope you will join us. Thank you very much indeed.