I commend you on your thinking on the topic, and on your concern, which I'm sure is genuine. As you say, it's something that you've been looking at for some time now.
I'm afraid that responsibility to protect, like a number of principles and doctrines—and like a number of things—is a bit like fashion. It seems to go a bit in and out of vogue. I think that maybe in the early 2000s, in 2002 and that time period, it seemed to be on the uptake. It seemed to be that the responsibility to protect was something that we had to fully endorse and develop.
I haven't studied this in any sort of disciplined way, but in my experience, it seems to me that it has fallen out of vogue and currently is not so much...we've drifted away from it a bit. I fully agree with you that we're pretty good on the first and second pillars and not very good on the third pillar.
Again, one reason for this is that we're at the fundamental loggerheads of international intervention and national sovereignty, as I'm sure you know. That's one of the real challenges of international law in general and human rights law. How do you deal with those things? How do you deal with the need to intervene? Some would point to what just happened in Syria with the Tomahawk missiles in dealing with issues of national sovereignty as well.
My personal opinion—and I'm not speaking as a commissioner now—is that I think we have to go further with that. We live in a world of globalization. Human rights cannot stop at the border. We're going to have to find ways to be more robust about this. On the third pilllar, the government is not meeting its responsibilities. On the second pillar, we have tried to assess them. We've offered manpower, treasure, whatever...and it's not getting done. The third pillar is that we have to go in and do it ourselves, but that is really at the very crossroads of international law at this point.