Keeping the R2P flame alive

Video message on occasion of 2026 Evans-Sahnoun Lecture, Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, New York, 9 July 2026

Thank you to Savita, Richard and all my colleagues at the Global Centre for everything that you are doing to keep the R2P flame alive, and to the Irish mission for again sponsoring this annual lecture, which I am touched and honoured – as would be my late friend and colleague Mahomed Sahnoun – to have given in our joint names.

In a world where too many political leaders of too many countries seem to have abandoned any shred of moral decency, it is crucial that they be reminded of the horrifying human cost of failing to prevent and respond to genocide and other mass atrocity crimes.

And it is equally important that that they be reminded that, just two decades ago, the world found it possible to reach unanimous agreement that every country has a responsibility to ensure that such suffering did not occur, and to agree on a set of principles for action to make that happen.

For all the disappointments of recent years, the concept of R2P has shown itself capable of capturing genuine cross-cultural repulsion at the kind of atrocities which killed some 80 million men, women and children during the course of the 20th Century, and many hundreds of thousands in Gaza, Sudan the Congo and elsewhere in the first years of our own.

It has done so in language which for most people remains instinctively attractive.

And it has shown itself able to create consensus for action where none previously existed.

It would be a tragedy now to succumb to the cynics and sceptics, to fail to see the continuing force of R2P as an energizing ideal, and to abandon the aspiration to see it fully and effectively implemented in all its dimensions.

Thank you all again, and I hope and expect that this event will have the impact it deserves, and the world so badly needs.

For the video record of this message, and the lecture by the International Crisis Group’s Richard Gowans which followed it, see website and link.