Inside Geneva

Send us Fan Mail On Inside Geneva this week, we take a step back from the breaking news and talk to the authors of two books about the better side of humanity. “The defence of human rights is not a matter of holding a candle and singing Kumbaya. The defence of human rights is about playing hardball. It's about putting pressure on governments, making them realise that repression isn't pay...

Send us Fan Mail On the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Inside Geneva has some big questions about the US-Russia talks this week on ending the war in Ukraine. “Is this really a peace deal or is it just a deal about money? Or is it even some kind of capitulation or a power grab?” asks Inside Geneva host Imogen Foulkes. What does US President Donald Trump want? “Do you want to jus...

Send us Fan Mail On Inside Geneva, we take a deep dive into the United States’ cuts in foreign aid. “In Colombia, they’ve just had to lay off 200 staff who were doing the demining in the south of the country. So, all of a sudden, these families have no work. And the alternative in the area, you know what it is: coca plants. So how is that in the US interest?” asks Tamar Gabelnick, director of the...

Send us Fan Mail Get in touch! Email us at insidegeneva@swissinfo.ch Twitter: @ImogenFoulkes and @swissinfo_en Thank you for listening! If you like what we do, please leave a review or subscribe to our newsletter.  For more stories on the international Geneva please visit www.swissinfo.ch/ Host: Imogen Foulkes Production assitant: Claire-Marie Germain Distribution: Sara Pasino Marketing: Xin Zhang

Send us Fan Mail With Israel banning UNRWA and the US planning to withdraw from WHO, our Inside Geneva podcast reports on a turbulent couple of weeks for United Nations agencies.  In Gaza, Israel’s ban on the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) has come into effect. “UNRWA is what we call the backbone of the humanitarian operation. Meaning that...

Send us Fan Mail In this week’s Inside Geneva podcast episode, we ask: what makes a good peace agreement? “Peace is not just a status. Peace is a process, and it’s a process that is part of politics in general,” says Laurent Goetschel from Swisspeace. So, are quick peace deals possible? “When someone says, ‘I want to have an agreement in 24 hours,’ my response as a professional is, ‘Okay. What are...

Send us Fan Mail For our planet, each year brings new climate records, and they’re not good ones. “We now know that 2024 is on track to be the warmest year on record. At the same time, we have accumulated more CO2 than ever in the history of human life on Earth,” says Celeste Saulo, Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization. On Inside Geneva this week, we look at the damage from t...

Send us Fan Mail In 2024 there are more than 100 conflicts ongoing, worldwide. A record number of aid workers have been killed.  Tom Fletcher, UN Emergency Relief Coordinator: ‘It’s not just the ferocity of these conflicts, Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Syria. It’s about that wilful neglect of international humanitarian law. And as a result we seem to have lost our anchor somehow. That scaffolding, that w...

Send us Fan Mail In this week’s Inside Geneva episode, UN correspondents in Geneva and New York look back at 2024.  Dorian Burkhalter, journalist, SWI swissinfo.ch: ‘Wars everywhere, climate change, deepening inequalities, AI…it’s just threats everywhere. But it just seems like the more global our problems are becoming, the weaker the UN is also becoming.’  But is the biggest event of the year the...

Send us Fan Mail Is the world still committed to human rights? Our Inside Geneva podcast is in Strasbourg, where the Council of Europe is discussing how to defend the fundamental principles we agreed upon after the Second World War. “We can’t just say, ‘Do it because it’s a human right’ or ‘Do it because it’s in a treaty.’ We have to demonstrate: ‘Do it, and this is how it will make your society b...

Send us Fan Mail This week Inside Geneva goes to New York. The United Nations (UN) General Assembly is hearing multiple reports of serious human rights violations. “I think it’s more difficult to get the human rights message [across] here in New York at the General Assembly. But hopefully we will be heard,” says Mariana Katzarova, UN special rapporteur on human rights in Russia. Ukraine, the Middl...

Send us Fan Mail On Inside Geneva this week we talk to the people behind a new book about life in Gaza, told through the words of those who live there.  “People are actually travelling in the middle of a war, in the middle of Gaza at midnight – the peak of the risk, if you like – to get somewhere where they can get a better internet so they can actually talk to us,” says Mahmoud Muna, editor of Da...

Send us Fan Mail The presidential elections in the United States (US) are just a couple of weeks away. What will they mean for international affairs, for Ukraine, for the Middle East, for humanitarian work, for international law and for the United Nations (UN) in Geneva? “When I was in the US, I definitely saw that there is no interest for anything called multilateralism or collaboration globally....

Send us Fan Mail It’s been one year since the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel. Twelve months of violent conflict have followed, with tens of thousands dead. We look back at our coverage over the past year. “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 de...

Send us Fan Mail For 40 years, there has been an absolute ban on torture. But it still happens… “Horrific things can happen to you. Nobody is there to help you. Nobody is there to document it, etc. And I think sometimes we speak about torture without putting ourselves in the shoes of what this is,” says Gerald Staberock from the World Organisation Against Torture. On our Inside Geneva podcast this...

Send us Fan Mail This month the United Nations (UN) will host the ‘Summit of the Future’ in New York. What's the point of this high-level event? Inside Geneva investigates. “The UN is not an entity that does anything. I mean, we can all blame it, but what is the UN? It’s just the sum of its parts: the governments,” says Christiane Oelrich, journalist for the DPA German Press Agency. Is the UN...

Send us Fan Mail The World Trade Organisation (WTO) Public Forum is underway in Geneva and its key theme is ‘re-globalisation’. Are we nervous of that word? Inside Geneva sat down with WTO officials to find out what it means. “Trade has been a very powerful force for reducing between-country inequality. Since 1995, for example, since the foundation of the WTO, extreme poverty in the world has been...

Send us Fan Mail Conflict-related sexual violence has existed for as long as war itself – forever. “It is a weapon of war. I would say it’s a weapon of mass destruction. It is really maximising harm,” says Esther Dingemans, Executive Director of the Global Survivors Fund. In Inside Geneva’s final summer profile, we talk to a woman working to support survivors of sexual violence…from Sudan, to Ukra...

Send us Fan Mail It’s three years since the Taliban took back control in Afghanistan. Inside Geneva talks to an Afghan human rights defender. “I was scared and I could see it coming. Yes, I mean, I think for the women of Afghanistan, we knew that the Taliban taking over would mean a dark future for women,” says Fereshta Abbasi from Human Rights Watch. In three years, women’s rights have been stead...

Send us Fan Mail Join us for a special extra edition of Inside Geneva to mark World Humanitarian Day, with testimonies from aid workers who have given their all – and who have often lost a great deal. “So I had taken him to the airport together with our child, and, yes, it took me in fact many years to be able to use the same elevator in the airport where I last kissed him,” says Laura Dolci.  Dol...

Send us Fan Mail In the fourth episode of our summer profile series on Inside Geneva, we talk to a Geneva career woman and a Geneva asylum-seeker about a project to unite communities through sport. Surely the world’s humanitarian capital is good at welcoming refugees and immigrants? “We have all these international organisations working on various global challenges. But when you talk to people fro...

Send us Fan Mail On Inside Geneva, we bring you part three of our summer profile series. This week we talk to a doctor looking for treatments for some of the world’s most neglected diseases. “Neglect means that there are diseases that affect an important proportion of humanity but for which no new drugs have been developed because there is no money in it. Because they affect very poor populations...

Send us Fan Mail Here’s episode two of our summer profiles series on the Inside Geneva podcast. We talk to the head of one of the world’s leading humanitarian agencies. We start with his first assignment in Darfur, in western Sudan. “As I was one day building the shelter I realised for the first time in many years I hadn't thought of what’s next? I wasn’t thinking everyday where do I go from...

Send us Fan Mail On Inside Geneva, we’re bringing you a series of summer profiles, from doctors in war zones to researchers into the diseases that affect the world’s poorest. Today, we talk to international human rights lawyer Antonia Mulvey, who devotes herself to defending women. “With many of those that we work with, who have been subjected to sexual violence, part of it is listening to them, h...

Send us Fan Mail Geneva is the home of international law, the rules that are supposed to stop the worst violations in war. But does anyone respect it anymore? Please watch the video version of this episode on YouTube. Andrew Clapham, Professor of International Law at the Geneva Graduate Institute, says: “It’s quite blatant that when we like what the International Criminal Court is doing we will su...