Gareth Evans is the President and Chief Executive of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG), an independent multinational non-governmental organisation with 90 full-time staff on five continents which works, through field-based analysis and high-level policy advocacy, to prevent and resolve deadly conflict.

A member of the Australian Parliament for 21 years Gareth Evans was one of Australia’s longest serving Foreign Ministers, best known internationally for his roles in developing the UN peace plan for Cambodia, bringing to a conclusion the international Chemical Weapons Convention, founding the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum and ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), and initiating the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons.

In 2000 and 2001, Evans was co-chair of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), appointed by the government of Canada, which published its report, The Responsibility to Protect, in December 2001.

He was a member of the UN Secretary General’s Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, is a member of the Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction sponsored by Sweden and chaired by Hans Blix, and of the International Task Force on Global Public Goods, chaired by Ernesto Zedillo. He had previously served as a member of the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, co-chaired by Cyrus Vance and David Hamburg (1994-97), and is currently a member of the UN Secretary-General’s Advisory Committee on the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities.

He is an endorser of the Genocide Intervention Network and serves on the International Editorial Board of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs.

He was Australian Humanist of the Year in 1990, won the ANZAC Peace Prize in 1994 for his work on Cambodia, was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in 2001, and was awarded Honorary Doctorates of Laws by Melbourne Universityin 2002 and Carleton University in 2005.

“The core idea of the responsibility to protect is very simple. Turn the notion of “right to intervene” upside down. Talk not about the “right” of big states to do anything, but the responsibility of all states to protect their own people from atrocity crimes, and to help others to do so.”