anyone talked about prevention or less extreme forms of engagement and intervention, and there was no system of international criminal justice to which anyone could resort.  The options were 'Send in the Marines' or do nothing. This was the environment which led Kofi Annan to issue his now famous challenge to the General Assembly in 2000: If humanitarian intervention is indeed an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica -- to gross and systematic violations of human rights that offend every precept of our common humanity? *** So the world had both an institutional problem, in particular the absence of international courts and tribunals with the jurisdiction, and resources, to try and punish those accused of major war crimes and crimes against humanity; and a political and normative problem, the absence of any agreed principles for addressing mass atrocity situations. The first piece of good news is that a major part of the institutional problem has been remedied in recent years. There has been the development of a number of specialist national courts with international assistance, like the Special Courts for Sierra Leone and Cambodia. There has been the establishment (following the example of the International Military Tribunal set up Nuremberg in 1945) of specialist tribunals to deal with war crimes committed in specific conflicts -- in particular for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda (in the establishment of which CEU Rector John Shattuck played an absolutely central role). And, most importantly, there has