The responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and for All Gareth Evans From the Preface In the year since this book first went to press, the world has moved closer to achieving the consensus that is at the heart of its massage. While in public policy, as in life itself, the course of true love never does run smooth, there seems less reason to fear now there was in mid-2008 that the idea of the responsibility to protect might not survive. As I write, the UN General Assembly is debating a report from the secretary-general on "Implementing the Responsibility to Protect" (UN General Assembly document A/63/677, tabled on January 12, 2009), with an overwhelming majority of states speaking in favor of the breakthrough language agreed unanimously by the 2005 World Summit, and pledging themselves to ensure its full and effective operation. The report […] not only fully reaffirms the original concept […] of the three "pillars" of the 2005 resolution: the responsibility of each state to protect its own populations from the atrocity crimes in question; the responsibility of others to assist it to do so; and the responsibility of the wider international community to respond in a "timely and decisive" fashion and by all appropriate means […] if this becomes necessary because the state in question is "manifestly failing" to Protect its people […] We should not be disconcerted that it has taken some time for clarity and consensus to emerge about the precise scope and limits of the responsibility to protect: that's just the way the world works […] Equally, we should not be too disconcerted if the necessary international response to even clear-cut responsibility-to-protect situations has been less effective than it should have been. That's just another regrettable fact of international life […].