I hope so. That is my honest answer. I will come to the specifics of how we might move forward on the responsibility to protect. It would be terrible if we had another situation where an atrocity was emerging and, for definitional reasons, we were unable to take appropriate action to prevent it from happening.
While I was in Kigali last month, in addition to attending the national commemoration at the football stadium, we had the 10th anniversary commemoration of the Kigali genocide memorial, which all Members have mentioned. The commemoration event was incredibly powerful. During that day, the mufti of Rwanda, the leader of the Muslim community there, spoke, and he did so on behalf of the Muslim community and also the main Christian Churches in Rwanda. He spoke about a new cross-faith initiative to take up what is happening
in the Central African Republic. One of the things that has come out of the Rwandan genocide is that the Government as well as the people of Rwanda are key voices in demanding international action in situations that they rightly fear could result in genocide or other mass atrocities.
Remembrance is vital, especially in this year. Commemoration and education are crucial, but as Members on both sides of the House have said, we need also to focus on prevention, and it is on that subject that I wish to finish my remarks. How can we make this responsibility to protect a concrete reality? I concur with the hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds). There are some real challenges in forging a consensus globally on this. We cannot underestimate the scale of those challenges, but it is vital that the United Kingdom is at the forefront of taking this forward.
Will the Minister say something about the current initiative from the French Government, who are proposing a code of conduct concerning the use of the veto power by the permanent members of the Security Council? The French Government propose that this should be adopted—this comes back to the point made by the hon. Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart)—in cases of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing. The proposal is for a mutual commitment by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council to suspend their right of veto in situations of mass atrocities.
We know that in 1994 there was a failure of collective action to prevent Rwandans from being killed simply because they were Tutsi or because they were Hutu people intervening on behalf of Tutsis.