Responsibility to Protect

In the shadow of the Holocaust, what is the world's continuing responsibility to prevent genocide and mass atrocity crimes and hold accountable those who commit them?  In recent decades genocide and mass atrocities have been committed in Cambodia, Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, Darfur, Libya and Syria, among other places.  The world stood by and did nothing in several of these situations, but intervened in others under the UN doctrine of responsibility to protect.  Today, nationalism and authoritarianism are on the rise, the US has withdrawn from human rights leadership, and support for implementing the responsibility to protect has diminished in the UN.  John Shattuck is a former US Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor who participated in the successful international effort to end the genocidal war in Bosnia, and helped establish the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.  He will discuss the lessons from and the future of the Responsibility to Protect.

Please join us afterwards for a reception and conversation. You can reserve your spot here.

John Shattuck is Professor of Practice in Diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Tufts University, specializing in transatlantic affairs and US foreign policy, and Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, focusing on the contemporary crisis of democracy in the US and Europe.  From 2009 to 2016 he was President of Central European University, a U.S. and European global graduate institution of social sciences, humanities, law, business and public policy in Budapest, Hungary.  Before coming to CEU in 2009, he was CEO of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Foundation, an international public affairs center in Boston, and Senior Fellow at Tufts University, where he taught human rights and international relations. He served as US Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor under President Clinton, participating in the Dayton Peace Process that ended the genocidal war in Bosnia, and helping establish the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.  Later he served as US Ambassador to the Czech Republic.  From 1984 to 1993 Shattuck was a Vice-President at Harvard University, and taught at the Harvard Law School.  He began his career as national staff counsel and Washington Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, representing victims of the civil liberties abuses of the Nixon Administration.  He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a board member of Humanity in Action, and chair of the international advisory board of the Center on Ethics, Justice and Public Life at Brandeis University.  His many publications include Freedom on Fire, a study of the international response to genocide and crimes against humanity, Rights of Privacy, and articles on higher education, human rights, foreign affairs and international security.