The Simons Forum: The Responsibility to Protect

The Responsibility to Protect: Re-energizing the Key Players

The Simons Forum brought together 30 international experts in Vancouver in March 2017 to discuss how best to reinvigorate the global response to the threat and reality of genocide and other mass atrocity crimes.

The Forum reflected on the history of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) since its birth in 2001 and adoption by the United Nations General Assembly in 2005, and took stock of its impact as a new normative force, as a catalyst for institutional change, and as a framework for both effective prevention and effective reaction. The Forum then sought to identify actions and strategies that would increase R2P’s ability to prevent, influence, respond to, and rebuild after, mass atrocity crimes, focusing on the actors with the greatest capacity to influence change.

The discussion was not a critique of individual cases, although many were referenced, but rather about the opportunities to learn from both successes and failures in attempts to implement R2P over the last twelve years.