High Commissioner's statement to High-Level Event on implementing R2P in the Geneva Context

High-level Event on "Implementing R2P in the Geneva Context  - A Focus on Prevention"
Geneva, 19 November 2015

Across the world, the staff of my Office and many other human rights defenders are reporting mounting atrocities within and outside armed conflict. We are seeing serious human rights violations in open warfare and proxy warfare across much of an entire region. We face extremism of a nature and brutality that is sickening, and yet it speaks to some fraction of a population that has been brutalized by generations of human rights violations and war. States and non-State actors are deliberately, and increasingly violating the most fundamental rules of international law. And they are doing so with impunity. 

Today, as you meet, there are people being systematically tortured by perpetrators who feel certain they will not be held accountable. There are people watching massive barrel bombs explode across the streets where they and their children live. People being worked to death in huge political prison camps. People fleeing their cities and villages out of panic – and fear – and need.  But the response of the international community has been tragically weak.

Ten years ago, at the World Summit, numerous leaders solemnly recognized that their States, and the international community as a whole, had a responsibility to protect people from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. Today, atrocity crimes are swelling across the globe, with vast and growing numbers of victims. And they are not being protected.

I truly welcome today’s high-level event, and I am grateful to the cross-regional RtoP core group for this initiative. RtoP should not be misunderstood as a “New York” issue. And it is emphatically not “just another agenda item”.

The undertaking to protect people against atrocity crimes is a matter of the utmost urgency, and it must guide our work here in Geneva as much as it does the work of New York.

Prevention of human rights violations is at the core of the responsibility to protect. If we intervene only after a situation reaches the point of crisis, when the horror of atrocity crimes has already begun, then, we have already failed to protect the most vulnerable. Furthermore, once atrocity crimes have commenced, political positions become more entrenched, and resistance to solution grows greater, the response options fewer and the costs higher.

The Human Rights Council plays a key role in implementing the Responsibility to Protect, even if its work is not often framed in these terms. The Council’s special procedure mandate holders have demonstrated that, like the staff of my Office, they have the capacity to detect looming crises and give early warning. Their recommendations, together with those of the treaty bodies and my Office, can address human rights-related risk factors that are also identified in the U.N. Framework of Analysis for Atrocity Crimes. Last June, I informally briefed member states in Geneva on critical situations in Africa, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. I hope through more such informal briefings to contribute to early warning and prevention.

No discussion in the world today could be more important than this one: our common responsibility, as human beings, to protect other people – and how we can achieve this in a world of such terrible pain.