For me, 7 April always lands with a particular weight. It takes me back to the beginning of the mainstream “origins story” of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, to the night Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down and the speed with which a (pre-AI and pre-Big Tech) society was reorganized around killing. Those international lawyers who spent time in Arusha during the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda years will remember how differently the story was later told in political terms and legal terms. Politically, a failure of imagination. A failure of political will. A failure of the United Nations to do in time what its Charter, at least on paper, made possible. In terms of the development of international criminal law, a success – the ICTY and the ICTR established precedents and set the tone for ad hoc international criminal law institutions to play an important role in post-conflict justice.

The legal language around obligations has hardened since then. Prevention is no longer abstract. The Genocide Convention has been read with more seriousness. The International Court of Justice in Bosnia v. Serbia made it clear that the duty to prevent is triggered early, at the point of serious risk, not at the edge of extermination and today in Gambia v. Myanmar we are expecting the Court to pronounce on the responsibility of the state in no equivocal tones. Courts have been underlining due diligence, capacity, influence to build their stand on state responsibility for atrocity crimes.

There ought to be a sense, 80 years after Nuremberg, 30 years after the ICTR, that the law has caught up with the horror. What we did not account for was how quickly clarity can coexist with indifference. I think of Gaza Strip now, and the days of counting down from another fateful 7th (October 2023). Of Myanmar over the last years and especially now as we await the ICJ’s judgment on the case. Of the widening shadow around Sudan that isn’t quite making the mark on the mainstream. None of these situations are legally opaque. The threshold questions may well be in hot argument in real time before in General Assembly halls, in advisory proceedings, in urgent applications for provisional measures. The vocabulary is familiar. Risk. Intent. Pattern. Plausibility.

And yet the system moves as if time were elastic. The Charter framework still allocates primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security to the Security Council. That much has not changed. What has changed is the degree to which paralysis has become routine. The veto no longer shocks. It settles things. It tells you, quite blandly, which crises will be managed and which will be endured. Much maligned R2P never disappeared, but it now lives in a diminished register, invoked selectively, avoided when it would require confrontation with Big Power.

From a doctrinal standpoint, the obligations remain stringent. The prohibition of genocide sits at the level of jus cogens. The duties that flow from it are owed to the international community as a whole. States do not get to plead distance or inconvenience. They are expected to use the means reasonably available to them to prevent. They are expected not to aid or assist in the commission of internationally wrongful acts. None of this is controversial in the terms of our understanding of this rather straightforward set of legal obligations. What has shifted is how comfortably these obligations are diluted and absorbed into ordinary state practice without consequence. Assistance is calibrated, framed, justified. Intelligence is hedged. Arms transfers are explained away through licensing regimes and end use assurances. The language of compliance is still there, but it has thinned out. It does less work.

Sifting through witness testimonies at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, there was at least the belief that law could arrive late and still matter. That individual criminal responsibility could mark a line, however imperfectly, between what the international community would tolerate and what it would name and punish. Fifteen years later, I am less certain of that now. Accountability processes are slower, more fragile, more easily outpaced by events on the ground.

So 7 April does not feel like a marker of distance between the now and the Never Again. It feels uncomfortably proximate.

We are not short on doctrine. We are not short on institutional design. We are not even short on forums in which to argue these questions. We are poorer today in what shocks our collective consciousness than we were in the 90s. The uneasy question is where was the tipping point that made our collective consciousness go numb and where that leaves the vision of international law as a justice project. If the core prohibitions can be acknowledged and set aside in practice, if prevention is endlessly deferred while debates on thresholds continue, then the law begins to resemble a language of record rather than a constraint. It documents. It condemns. It does not interrupt.

April 7 was marked with the usual phrases with which international law soberly recalls the beginning of 100 days of killings in the land of 1000 hills. Memory. Dignity. Never again. They still matter, there is no taking away from that – but they sound different when placed against the present. It is difficult to sit with what we know, doctrinally and historically, and not conclude that the problem is no longer whether the system understands genocide. It does. The problem is that it has learned how to live with it.