Responding to Mass Atrocity Crimes: The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) After Libya and Syria Public Lecture by Professor the Hon Gareth Evans, Co-Chair, Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, President Emeritus of the International Crisis Group, and former Foreign Minister of Australia, Central European University School of Public Policy, Budapest, 24 October 2012 As we look back at not only what has been happening in recent months in Syria, but over recent decades, and indeed over the whole course of human history, one of the most depressing and distressing realities we have to acknowledge has been our inability to prevent or halt the apparently endlessly recurring horror of mass atrocity crimes -- the murder, torture, rape, starvation, expulsion, destruction of property and life opportunities of others for no other reason than their race, ethnicity, religion,  nationality, cast,  class,  ideology or opinion. What is in some ways hardest of all to believe is how little changed in the decades after World War II. One might have thought that Hitler's atrocities within Germany and in the states under Nazi occupation would have laid to rest once and for all the notion -- predominant in international law and practice since the emergence of modern nation states in the 17th century -- that what happens within state borders is nobody else's business: to put it starkly, that sovereignty is essentially a license to kill. But even with all the developments in international human rights law and international humanitarian law which followed the War