Inside Geneva

Send us Fan Mail In this week’s episode of our Inside Geneva podcast, we revisit our coverage of laws that changed the world. Save the Date for a live recording We’d like to invite you to a live recording session of our Inside Geneva podcast about the role of the Geneva Conventions and international law. Mark your calendars - June 5, 2024, from 12:30am to 13:30pm - at the Geneva Graduate Institute...

Send us Fan Mail Four years ago, our lives were upended by the Covid-19 pandemic. Countries locked down, millions became ill, millions died. And when the vaccine finally arrived, it was not fairly distributed. Rich countries bought too many, poor countries waited, with nothing.  “What we saw during the Covid-19 pandemic was collapse. Basically, a complete failure of international cooperation,” say...

Send us Fan Mail In the wars in Ukraine and in the Middle East, new, autonomous weapons are being used. Our Inside Geneva podcast asks whether we’re losing the race to control them – and the artificial intelligence systems that run them.    “Autonomous weapons systems raise significant moral, ethical, and legal problems challenging human control over the use of force and handing over life-and-deat...

Send us Fan Mail The world is marking 30 years since the Rwandan genocide. Inside Geneva talks to those who witnessed it.  “We came to one village where there were a few survivors and a man came to me with a list and said ‘look, the names have been crossed out one by one, entire families, they were killing everybody from those families,’” says Christopher Stokes, from Médecins Sans Frontières (Doc...

Send us Fan Mail In Inside Geneva this week we get an eyewitness account of a mission to supply Gaza’s hospitals.  Chris Black, World Health Organisation: ‘People have told me oh you must be very brave for going to Gaza. I don’t think so, I think what’s brave is the people who have been doing this work since early October, and who go back every day, to do it again and again and again.’  Aid agenci...

Send us Fan Mail In 2024, four billion of us can vote in elections. Can democracy survive artificial intelligence (AI)? Can the UN, or national governments, ensure the votes are fair?  “Propaganda has always been there since the Romans. Manipulation has always been there, or plain lies by not very ethical politicians have always been there. The problem now is that with the power of these technolog...

Send us Fan Mail The UN’s refugee agency for Palestinians, UNRWA, is the focus of major scrutiny after Israel claimed some UNRWA staff were involved in the October 7th attacks, and thousands more were members of Hamas, or supportive of it. Now one of two UN investigations has concluded that UNRWA does need to improve its measures to uphold the humanitarian principles of impartiality and neutrality...

Send us Fan Mail The war in Ukraine is two years old. Inside Geneva discusses the latest military developments in Ukraine, the chances of peace and where the war will go from here. “Isn’t there a limit when there are so many civilian deaths so you as a state have a responsibility to stop?” asks journalist Gunilla van Hall.  How will this war end? Ukraine, with the West’s support, is fighting a reg...

Send us Fan Mail It’s one year since devastating earthquakes hit Turkey and Syria. Inside Geneva talks to search and rescue teams who were there:   Filip Kirazov, from Search and Rescue Assistance in Disasters (SARAID) says: “Every member of SARAID is a volunteer. So no one gets paid for any of the work we do. Our sole aim is to minimize human suffering, due to the impact of natural or manmade dis...

Send us Fan Mail The International Court of Justice (the United Nations’ top court) is considering charges of genocide against Israel. The case was brought by South Africa. Adila Hassim, the lawyer for South Africa, says: “Palestinians are subjected to relentless bombing. They are killed in their homes, in places where they seek shelter, in hospitals, in schools, in mosques, in churches and as the...

Send us Fan Mail The bitter conflict in Gaza has polarised opinions. Aid agencies are caught in the middle. Fabrizio Carboni, Regional Director of the Near and Middle East division of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC): “People tend to believe we can do things that actually we can’t. I mean we have no army, we have no weapons.” Some say the ICRC hasn’t done enough to help Israeli...

Send us Fan Mail In the last Inside Geneva of 2023, UN correspondents look back at the year..and what a year it’s been. Emma Farge, Reuters: ‘This year has felt like lurching from one catastrophe to another.’ Earthquakes, climate change, or war –the UN is always expected to step in. Nick Cumming-Bruce, contributor, New York Times: ‘This is a multilateral system that is absolutely falling apart und...

Send us Fan Mail The world is marking an important anniversary: the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. After the Second World War, this was supposed to be our "never again" moment. The  Universal Declaration of Human Rights promises us the right to live, to freedom of expression, the right not to be tortured, to equality regardless of gender, race or religion....

Send us Fan Mail This week Inside Geneva sits down for the last in our series of exclusive interviews with UN human rights commissioners. Volker Türk has a copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that he was given at school more than 40 years ago. Growing up in his native Austria, he focused his mind on human rights. "In light of the history of my own country, Holocaust, its own atr...

Send us Fan Mail Geneva recently hosted the Peace Week annual forum. Inside Geneva asks what’s the point, especially when there seems to be so much conflict still going on. “What we have to deal with is the immense stupidity of the wars that currently are in place. And here we are having to deal with wars of a sort that were better found in the history books devoted to the 20th century and ought n...

Send us Fan Mail On Inside Geneva this week: part six of our series marking the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Imogen Foulkes talks to Michelle Bachelet, who served as UN Human Rights Commissioner from 2018 to 2022. She was a young woman during Chile’s military dictatorship, and experienced human rights violations first hand. “You needed to be as strong as possible,...

Send us Fan Mail The current conflict in the Middle East is the most violent in decades. An Inside Geneva special asks what the rules of law allow, and what they forbid.  Marco Sassòli, Professor of International Law at the University of Geneva, says: “the massacre Hamas committed among those festival visitors are clear violations of international humanitarian law. [...] The entire northern Gaza S...

Send us Fan Mail It’s more than a year and a half since Russia invaded Ukraine. The war shows no sign of ending, and Moscow is cracking down on all opposition.  This week, Inside Geneva asks how we can support human rights inside Russia. "Since the full scale invasion of Ukraine had been launched in February of last year, the regime has brought back the entire arsenal of Soviet style repressi...

Send us Fan Mail On Inside Geneva this week: part five of our series marking the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  Imogen Foulkes talks to Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein, who served as UN Human Rights Commissioner from 2014 to 2018.  He became the first Asian, Muslim and Arab to hold the position. But did he plan a career in human rights from an early age? "No, I was far...

Send us Fan Mail Inside Geneva is marking its 100th podcast episode this week. In this episode host Imogen Foulkes looks back at some of the podcast highlights. This episode starts with an assessment of how humanitarians coped with the war in Syria.  Jan Egeland, former head of the United Nations humanitarian taskforce for Syria says: "Syria was a real setback where these besiegements, the bo...

Send us Fan Mail On Inside Geneva this week: part four of our series marking the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Imogen Foulkes talks to Navi Pillay, she served as UN Human Rights Commissioner from 2008 to 2014, she started life in racially segregated South Africa.   "We grew up under apartheid and we’re realised there’s something very unfair here. Our teachers...

Send us Fan Mail August marks two important days in the humanitarian calendar  First, the International day of the disappeared. Fabrizio Carboni, ICRC: ‘I look at my kids, I look at my family, and I say ‘imagine now there is a frontline between us and my son, my brother, my mother, my father, are captured and I can't see them for a year, two, three, four.’’   Inside Geneva hears how the ICRC...

Send us Fan Mail On Inside Geneva this week: part three of our series marking the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Host Imogen Foulkes talks to Louise Arbour, who served as UN Human Rights Commissioner from 2004 to 2008. She arrived in Geneva with a formidable track record. As a prosecutor for the former Yugoslavia, she had indicted Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes....

Send us Fan Mail On Inside Geneva this week we take a deep dive into the pros and cons of artificial intelligence. Should the United Nations (UN) help to regulate it? Could it even do that? Across the UN there are different views.  Tomas Lamanauskas, deputy secretary general of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) says that "the technology in itself has a huge potential to help us...

Send us Fan Mail On Inside Geneva this week: part two of our series marking the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Imogen Foulkes talks to Mary Robinson, the second person to serve as UN Human Rights Commissioner. Even as a schoolgirl in Ireland, she was already passionate about human rights.  ‘I was a bit of a bookworm, and I found a book with a photograph of Eleanor R...