International Advisory Council /

Gareth Evans

Professor the Hon Gareth Evans AO QC is Distinguished Honorary Professor at the Australian National University, where he was Chancellor from 2010-19,  and President Emeritus of the International Crisis Group, the independent global conflict prevention and resolution organisation which he led from 2000 to 2009.

He previously spent 21 years in Australian politics, thirteen of them as a Cabinet Minister. As Foreign Minister (1988-96) he was best known internationally for his roles in developing the UN peace plan for Cambodia, concluding the Chemical Weapons Convention, and initiating new Asia Pacific regional economic and security architecture. He has written or edited nine books – most recently The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and for All, published by the Brookings Institution in 2008 – and has published over 100 journal articles and chapters on foreign relations, human rights, and legal and constitutional reform.

He has co-chaired two major International Commissions, on Intervention and State Sovereignty (2000-01), and Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament (2008-10), whose report Eliminating Nuclear Threats was published in December 2009. He was a member of the UN Secretary-General’s High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change (2004), the Blix Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction (2006), the Zedillo Commission of Eminent Persons on The Role of the IAEA to 2020 and Beyond (2008) and the UN Secretary-General’s Advisory Committee on Genocide Prevention. He is Co-Chair of the International Advisory Board of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect.

In May 2010 Gareth Evans was awarded the 2010 Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute Four Freedoms Award for Freedom from Fear, for his pioneering work on the Responsibility to Protect concept, and his contributions to conflict prevention and resolution, arms control and disarmament. In December 2011 Foreign Policy magazine cited him as one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers for 2011.

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