 My name is Slater Molland and I am the coordinator of the Master of Applied Anthropology and Participatory Development here at the ANU. Within our programme we have several specialisations including one on humanitarian action. Humanitarianism is pertinent today given current conflicts like in Syria where we see mass atrocities occurring at the same time the difficult question of how the international community may respond in terms of military action or otherwise. The key concept that has been evolving over the last few years is the responsibility to protect doctrine and I am very fortunate to be joined by Professor Gareth Evans to discuss this topic. Professor Evans is the Chancellor of ANU as well as the former Foreign Minister of Australia and has had a very long engagement with the question of how to deal with human rights violations including work with the United Nations and International Crisis Group. Professor Evans, what is the key idea behind the responsibility to protect doctrine and how did you get involved with the development of this concept? The key idea essentially was whatever else we screw up in the conduct of our international relations don't let's ever make a mess again of our response to mass atrocity crimes, genocide, major war crimes, major crimes against humanity. The doctrine was born of the unholy mess the international community was in in the 1990s in the situations in Rwanda where we just gazed with impotence as 800,000 people were hacked to death in a few short weeks without any intervention by the international community. Then again in Bosnia just a few short months afterwards in 95 you had the 8,000 men and boys being taken out under the noses of UN peacekeepers and shot in Srebrenica. You had the inability of the international community to get its act together in any kind of coherent way with the approval of the Security Council in responding to Kosovo and generally it was a consensus-free zone. I got involved because Kofi Annan addressed a challenge to the General Assembly in 2000 saying look if the doctrine or the idea of humanitarian intervention is such a terrible assault on state sovereignty that we can't contemplate it how then do we respond as an international community to these terrible atrocities we've seen successively in Rwanda, in Bosnia, in Kosovo. What are we going to do about it as an international community? The Canadian government responded to that challenge by establishing an international commission on intervention and state sovereignty that was its name and I was asked to be co-chair of that along with the very distinguished African diplomat and we essentially tried to find a way of recreating or creating for the first time a consensus in the international community that these things were everybody's business and that there was a way through the dilemma of traditional state claims to impunity from any interference or intervention by others with on the other hand the compelling imperative of engagement when there were major atrocities, human rights catastrophes occurring and the idea that we came up with in our report which has acquired a lot of traction frequently is this concept of the responsibility to protect so rather than talk about the right to intervene which is the way the debate had been conducted without consensus up until then we talked about the responsibility of all states not to intervene but to protect citizens at risk of mass atrocity crimes it's a complicated concept with a number of dimensions you'll no doubt want to draw out but what this change of language and change of conceptual approach did was create a new environment internationally which for the first time showed the potential for real consensus in dealing with these horrible situations there's been several criticisms of the concept one of them being that it doesn't quite overcome the real politic if you like of international relations at the end of the day it's claimed a national self-interest tends to triumph over this more general universal concern for protecting human life how would you respond to those sorts of criticisms? I think those claims are misconceived let's get to the nub of what the responsibility to protect is about as embraced unanimously by the General Assembly sitting at heads of state and government level at the World Summit in 2005 and basically it's got three dimensions the first dimension is the responsibility of every state to ensure that its own people don't experience such atrocity crimes either at the hands of the state itself or at the hands of groups within society while the state is impotent or unwilling to deal with it it's the responsibility of every state to deal with those situations to the best of its ability secondly it's the responsibility of every state to assist other states that might be wanting to protect their own people but just not have the resources or the capacity to do so so the responsibility to assist is very very important both at the preventive stage and the reactive stage and thirdly there's the responsibility to actually engage when prevention has failed when atrocity crimes are occurring or imminently feared when clearly a state is incapable or unwilling of addressing the problem itself then there's this wider responsibility for the international community to engage not necessarily just through military intervention that's a very extreme response at one right at one end of the spectrum but there's a responsibility to engage through diplomatic pressure and persuasion and through non-military coercive measures like sanctions and threats of prosecution to the international criminal court so the responsibility to protect is quite a nuanced multi-dimensional concept which deals with all stages of these situations from prevention to reaction to post-crisis rebuilding and it's got these different layers of responsibility starting with the state itself and then to assist and then to engage so viewed that way it's not something that can in any way simply be seen as giving encouragement to the big guys to throw their weight around that was the case I think with the doctrine of humanitarian intervention or the right to intervene which was alive and well as the only real discourse in the 1990s and earlier years the replacement doctrine responsibility to protect which is now the way in which the world talks about these issues a concept which by its very nature I think recognises the constraints as much as the opportunities for intervention and really sets the bar quite high on any state being disposed to throw its weight around militarily and to just use this as an excuse or a cover for doing what the bad old imperialist guys used to do so often in the past That brings us also to the current situations in conflicts like Syria for example how does the current conflict in Syria relate to this concept of responsibility to protect? Well ever since Syria blew up in mid-2011 atrocities have been perpetrated first of all on a one-sided basis by the regime against unprotesting against unarmed protesters and subsequently as the situation morphed into what has really become a full-scale civil war clearly atrocity crimes have been perpetrated by both sides this has been a real test for the responsibility to protect doctrine because clearly the international community until perhaps now with the chemical weapons issue as a new trigger for action to which people are being responsive up until now the security council has been paralysed and people have just sort of watched while the situation got worse and worse 100,000 people are killed so people are saying what's left of the responsibility to protect doctrine I think still quite a lot that the problem was that in Syria it followed hot on the heels of what was a very successful application of the doctrine in Libya we can all remember the situation Gaddafi treating his people calling them dogs and dealing with unarmed protesters then about to march on Benghazi where there was the expectation that perhaps tens of thousands of people would be killed that triggered a very clear-cut, firm, robust, quick international response which was a military response if it had more or less stayed at that an effective civilian protection operation I think that would have been the triumph of the responsibility to protect at work and we would have seen some very clear markers laid down for the future which would have had a significant impact in deterring what's happened in Syria unfortunately the Libyan situation became very controversial because the intervening powers, the permanent three members of the UN UK, France, US, leading NATO didn't just stop with the civilian protection exercise they went all the way to full-scale regime change maybe sometimes you can only achieve civilian protection through regime change but that was certainly controversial in Libya maybe Gaddafi could have been stopped by much less than waging all-out war with him this then gave an excuse if you like to the Russians to say in the context of Syria we're not going to support even lesser measures in Syria because that will just be the trigger for unleashing a sequence of events and culminating in exercise of indefensible military power so it's a long and complicated story it's been very controversial in Syria but while all that's been going on still the issue of responsibility to protect generally has been debated in the Security Council the terminology has been used in other cases in Mali, in Sudan and elsewhere Yemen the General Assembly has debated the protective and preventive dimensions of the concept and expressed continuing support for it and I think generally the doctrine really has a future because if we can just get past this terrible situation in Syria and maybe now the door is open to do that with the terrible misjudgment by the Assad regime of using chemical weapons and incurring the wrath of the Russians among others there's a lot of pressure now for that situation to change if we can get back on the rails I think the responsibility to protect doctrine really will continue to be the way in which the world thinks and acts about mass atrocity crimes because nobody wants to go back to the bad old days of standing idly by or impotently by or indifferently by while terrible things are happening like the massacre in Cambodia or the massacre in Rwanda or the massacre in Bosnia-Sebranica and so on I think there is an understanding that these issues are everybody's business and that this responsibility to protect doctrine is nuanced enough and sensitive enough to real-world currents that are operating to be the working doctrine for dealing with these situations And finally, what is the role of Australia in all this given Australia's seat on the Security Council? Well, Australia has been right from the outset a strong advocate of the doctrine of responsibility to protect and argued for its application in a variety of contexts with a little bit of help from me pushing the government along as you might expect On the Security Council, I think it's very important while we're there for our voice to be heard in trying to recreate a consensus on the Council itself after that consensus broke down as I've described over the Libyan situation I think there is a way forward and perhaps the Council accepting perhaps to impose upon itself some discipline to ensure that when a serious military enforcement mandate is granted then there will be some effective ongoing monitoring and review process to ensure that Council members the majority of them remain comfortable with the way that mandate is being exercised They were manifestly uncomfortable that came to be exercised in the Libyan case and I think Australia can be an important voice while we're sitting on the Council in bringing that consensus back together again and I certainly hope over the next year or so we can do just that Thank you very much Professor Evans For those of you who would like to explore this topic further may want to have a look at Professor Evans' book The Responsibility to Protect Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and For All which is available through libraries, bookshops and online For those of you who would like to explore further studies relating to humanitarianism please have a look at ANU's website for further details