A/HRC/27/24 21. Member States had made a landmark commitment at the 2005 World Summit, articulated in paragraphs 138 and 139 of the outcome document. In that document, all Heads of State and Government affirmed their responsibility, both individual and collective, to protect populations by preventing genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, and incitement to such crimes. As each of the five annual reports of the Secretary-General on the responsibility to protect had underlined, preventive action lay at the core of the three pillars of the responsibility to protect. 22. The Special Adviser also highlighted various regional initiatives to develop preventive capacity, such as the establishment of the Regional Committee for the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity and all Forms of Discrimination, by the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region, and of the Latin American Network for the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities. He also referred to inter-agency arrangements, and to the nomination of focal points on the responsibility to protect or on the prevention of genocide. He referred to the Global Action Against Mass Atrocity Crimes meeting that had taken place in Costa Rica in March 2014, which had brought together 56 States that had appointed the focal points. He further highlighted national prevention initiatives launched by members of various regional networks. 23. The Special Adviser acknowledged the important role played by the Human Rights Council in advancing prevention, including the Council’s role in establishing commissions of inquiry and in addressing specific situations of concern. He stressed that the Council was an important body in the area of genocide prevention, whose voice should be heard more frequently and more consistently. He recommended that the Council endeavour to anticipate the risk of atrocity crimes and that it engage at an early stage to pre-empt escalations of tensions into potentially genocidal violence. The Special Adviser invited the Human Rights Council to adopt the Framework of Analysis that his Office had developed for assessing the risk of atrocity crimes. 24. The Special Adviser noted that genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity were not single events that happened overnight. They were processes that involved different stages, and required planning and resources. The Framework of Analysis identified risk factors relevant to assessing the risk of genocide and other atrocity crimes. Identifying risks at an early stage provided opportunities to develop effective prevention strategies, well before situations escalated to the point where they became more costly and more difficult to control. The Special Adviser also encouraged the Human Rights Council to discuss how to better monitor the implementation of the Genocide Convention as, in contrast to other human rights treaties, the Convention did not provide for a dedicated body to monitor its implementation. He believed that the absence of a monitoring mechanism may encourage some States to ignore their obligations under the Convention, including the responsibility to prevent. 25. In his conclusion, the Special Adviser highlighted the importance of dedication and political will in fighting for a world where people were no longer targeted because of the colour of their skin, their ethnic background, their religious faith, or any other form of identity. The international community should strive to prevent future atrocity crimes. 26. In his intervention, Jonathan Sisson, of the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, shared some reflections on the mechanisms of prevention and accountability for atrocity crimes. He noted that the adoption of the Genocide Convention in 1948 had marked a historical milestone on the path towards prevention and accountability. Nevertheless, he emphasized that, while the Convention provided an important framework for accountability after the commission of genocide, experience had shown that national and international courts found it exceedingly difficult in practice to convict the suspected authors of genocide. Furthermore, practitioners and policymakers had accumulated considerable 7