The International Community has a responsibility to document the human rights abuses being carried out in northern Iraq by Islamist extremists so the perpetrator can later be "brought to justice", according to the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Most Revd Justin Welby's made the comments at the inauguration of his antipodean counterpart, Archbishop Philip Freier, the Anglican Primate of Australia.
Speaking at a joint press conference in Melbourne on Wednesday, Archbishop Justin said: "Ever since the war to end all wars ended in 1918, humankind have been saying "never again", then we wring our hands as genocide unfolds in some distant corner. But what is happening right now in northern Iraq is off the scale of human horror."
Hi comments were echoed by Archbishop Philip Freier, who went a step further by calling on Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott to offer asylum to the victims of the crisis.
Archbishop Freier said: " I have asked him to emulate France in offering asylum to the Christians of northern Iraq who are facing forced conversion or death."
More than 200,000 people have been displaced in the past fortnight, including all the residents of Iraq's largest Christian town, Qaraqosh, and a large number of the Yazidi minority group.
Meanwhile, proposed operations to airlift thousands of refugees who've fled Islamist fighters from a mountainside in northern Iraq are looking less likely.It's after US intelligence found fewer people still trapped there than feared.
David Cameron , who's ordered Chinook helicopters to head to the region hasn't ruled out rescue flights, he said: "we have to respond to the situation as it develops, and we need to make sure we have good information about how many people there are; how many need to leave, how well they can get to a place of safety and our plans have got to be flexible enough to help those people".
A UK team's also understood to be gathering information for possible humanitarian work.