Outsourcing Protection to Accountability

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Chapter 5 examines the international response to violent conflict in Syria and Myanmar after 2015 and 2017 respectively. In the face of inaction by the UN Security Council, actors turned to a wide variety of innovative accountability mechanism and legal cases. These cases mark a significant turning point in the international accountability landscape, including the ratcheting up of cooperation between states, lawyers, civil society, and international courts. Innovations included the creation of a new type of quasi-legal investigatory mechanism to gather evidence of international crimes future prosecution, a new investigatory body of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) and UN to address the use of chemical weapons, the expansion of universal jurisdiction, and the invocation of third-party responsibility for the crime of genocide at the International Court of Justice. These cases saw the consolidation of an active international civil society involved in evidence gathering and documentation of international crimes shared across international and foreign domestic courts, and the intensification of language aimed at criminal prosecution within human rights bodies. The innovative practices developed templates that were rapidly mobilized in subsequent cases, as is examined in Chapter 6 in the context of war in Ukraine and Gaza.</jats:p>