The events of two weeks ago were jarring. In truth, there are issues here that are deep and old. There is the annexing of Crimea and strategic intervention into other territories. There's the end of the Warsaw Pact and what followed, the Minsk agreements. But what's undeniable is that this is an act of aggression, an undeniable breach of international law causing the most catastrophic of rights abuses on the ground. Many people have asked me in the last week, has the UN failed us? Well, within the buildings in Geneva is the Human Rights Alliance of Civilizations Room, where the Human Rights Council often meet. The artist Barceló created a rather extraordinary work on the ceiling that he describes as "a sea upside down". As you sit underneath it, you look up to the floor of the sea, our common baseline. And in many ways, this was the poetic spirit behind the drafting of the charter to prevent a subsequent world war, to protect that baseline through, in part, the veto.