‘Never again Auschwitz’ is a powerful, emotive cry, laden with the guilt of the past, but replete with the promise of redemption by taking action, this time, to stop the extermination of our fellow human beings. The promise was embedded in the very first United Nations human rights treaty, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in December 1948, concluded almost four years after the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps were liberated. The speed with which this Convention was agreed reflected the deeply-felt need to reset the world's moral bearings after the Nazis' monstrous plans to wipe out entire populations had been revealed. This ‘odious scourge’ – in the words of the Convention's preamble – had to be eliminated.

Over sixty years later, and ‘never again Auschwitz’ is more replete with irony than redemption. Again and again genocide has been carried out, and again and again, little has been done by the United Nations (UN) – and its member states – in response. And yet, again and again, the promise of ‘never again’ is repeated. This book asks why such a strong and apparently deeply-felt moral imperative remains, for the most part, rhetorical. It does so by concentrating on European governments' response to genocide. Given the historical legacy of the Holocaust (or Shoah) in Europe, and the general importance given to international law and the protection of human rights by European states, it would be reasonable to assume that European states have similar views on how they should respond to a genocide being perpetrated in another country, and that their response would be a forceful one.