A/HRC/40/33 23. The Special Adviser recalled that 149 States had ratified or acceded to the Convention, leaving 44 Member States yet to join. That lack of commitment was puzzling and raised the question of what message those States were sending, 70 years after the adoption of the Convention. History had shown that genocide could happen anywhere, and to think otherwise was naive. 24. The Special Adviser referred to the Secretary-General’s one-year appeal for the universal ratification of the Convention, which had been launched in 2017, and urged nonsignatory Member States to prioritize ratifying the Convention by its seventieth anniversary, on 9 December 2018. Ratification was a matter of moral obligation towards humanity. It represented a recognition of the responsibility of States towards their populations and showed respect for those who had perished. The Convention provided the basis of preventive action and had played a vital role in the development of international criminal law. In the light of the negative impact of the crime of genocide on international peace and security, ratifying the Convention was not just a symbol of international unity, but demonstrated commitment to the fundamental principles of the United Nations. 25. The Special Adviser called for the Convention to be protected as it marked its seventieth anniversary. “Never again”, the call that had led the international community to draft the convention, had in fact become “time and again”. More than ever, the Convention had relevance and could only be put to rest when the threat of genocide no longer existed. There was a lack of commitment towards the Convention; that commitment and the resolve to take preventive action must be reinvigorated. 26. The Special Adviser concluded by recalling that the Convention, together with other human rights treaties and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, remained the most important legal standard embodying the promise of “never again”, which the world had made 70 years ago, and he called on all the Member States to join the cause. There could be no justification for not doing so, as it was a moral imperative. 27. Kimberly Prost, judge at the International Criminal Court, shared her experience as an international criminal law practitioner, drawing in particular on her time as a judge of the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in a trial with seven accused, the largest handled by the Tribunal. 28. For four years, Judge Prost and her colleagues had listened to witnesses, including victims, survivors, those who had been there to protect, those involved in the conflict and those who had participated in the crime, and reviewed the evidence on the unfolding Srebrenica genocide. They had received a vast amount of evidence – involving more than 300 witnesses and almost 90,000 pages of documents detailing what had happened before, during and after the attacks in Srebrenica and Žepa in Bosnia and Herzegovina in July 1995. 29. In the context of the high-level panel, Judge Prost focused on two lessons that could be drawn from the circumstances and architecture of the genocide in Srebrenica, which were not unique to that case. First, the atrocities arose from a foundation of smouldering hatred, bigotry and ethnic and religious division that had never been addressed, but rather were covered over and supressed by systems put in place precisely in order to address them. That smouldering had continued until, inevitably, new oxygen brought the flames to life again. The fire had been fuelled by decades – even centuries – of cyclical violence and atrocities, the response to which had never been justice but more atrocity. The words of one witness had stayed with her: “one day we were neighbours and the next day we were killing each other”. The painfully clear lesson was that ending the immediate conflict and violence was insufficient. Rather, the only way to prevent genocide and other atrocities was by addressing the underlying issues, ending the cycle of violence, replacing vengeance with justice and ensuring accountability. 30. The second lesson was an ancient one, which the international community did not seem to have learned: that evil could arise from unconstrained power. The architects of the massacre in Srebrenica had been driven by their perceived absolute power, as evidenced by the words of Ratko Mladić, captured on film as he proudly marched through the fallen protected enclave of Srebrenica and boarded a bus filled with members of the Muslim community: “I am Ratko Mladić … you will have heard of me … I am giving you your life 6