In 2001, Canada’s Lloyd Axworthy led a United Nations commission that promoted the adoption of a resolution that would obligate the international community to intervene in cases of ethnic cleansing, genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity in states that fail to protect their own populations. Known as the Responsibility to Protect, it was motivated by atrocities of the previous decade.

In 1994, Canadian General Roméo Dallaire was in charge of a United Nations peacekeeping mission in Rwanda when he learned that Hutu extremists were making plans for a mass killing of ethnic Tutsis. Despite his pleas to U.N. headquarters for authority and troops needed to prevent the coming slaughter, he was denied. In a period of 100 days, some 800,000 men, women and children were massacred.

The following year, as violence erupted in former Yugoslavia, the United Nations established a ‘safe area’ under its protection in the town of Srebenica in Bosnia-Herzegovina. But the small U.N. contingent of 370 soldiers was unable to prevent the town’s capture by Serbian forces which massacred more than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys.

Many of the perpetrators of the crimes against humanity in that war were brought to justice by another Canadian, former Supreme Court justice Louise Arbour, after her appointment as Chief Prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

Two decades ago, in 2005, the United Nations finally passed the Responsibility to Protect resolution requiring countries to intervene to protect life and security, even when such intervention would be at odds with state sovereignty and the principle of non-interference in a country’s domestic affairs. To Canada’s credit, Canadians have had much to do with getting the world to a point where it can act.

Yet, here we are, 18 months into a conflict between Israel and Hamas that has cost more than 50,000 Palestinian lives, a death toll that continues to mount at the hands of the Israeli military, day after day.

Where is the Responsibility to Protect in all of this? Nowhere to be seen.

With the United States in a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council, it has the power to veto any effort to intervene in what it considers the domestic affairs of the sovereign state of Israel. Nor would Russia or China be likely supporters of such a move, given their own treatment of minorities within their borders.

It is true, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant, for war crimes and crimes against humanity. But Deif is believed to be dead, and there has been no arrest of Netanyahu as Israel is not party to the Rome Statute that created the ICC and so is not bound by its authority. Nor is the United States, where Netanyahu recently visited his ally Donald Trump with whom he mused about expelling all the Palestinians from Gaza to make way for resorts along the Mediterranean coast.

In other words, there has been little-to-no progress by the international community in halting this atrocity. With each passing day, Netanyahu finds new ways of rationalizing the continuing deprivations and assault on the people of Gaza.

The United Nations was born out of two world wars, with a mission to prevent such human catastrophes from ever happening again. But it is, time and again, confounded in its efforts to fulfill this mission by the veto powers of the permanent members of its Security Council.

Is that the end of the story? Must it be humanity’s fate that vetoes granted in a Faustian bargain with five countries 80 years ago will forever undermine the very purpose for which the United Nations was created?

Must we accept that there is nothing to be done to rescue thousands upon thousands of fellow human beings from oppression, starvation, expulsion and extermination, while the perpetrators are protected from prosecution by their choice not to be accountable to the international court?

In the names of Roméo, Louise and Lloyd, where are Canada’s courage and leadership on this issue?