27/09/2026
Dear friends,
Today, after three years in Geneva, I’m hazarding a small experiment: a weekly recap of all the work being done in organizations such as the WHO, UNCTAD, the Human Rights Council, UNHCR and CERN.
Why now? Because the mood is grim and the outlook is bleak. Wars and civil wars are costing millions of lives. Multilateralism is under attack and is struggling to produce results. Human rights, particularly women’s rights, are being rolled back in many parts of the world. The countdown to the next pandemic may have begun. Climate change has already started inflicting massive damage and disruption and AI has been added to the list of existential threats facing humanity and the planet. Indeed, the rise of AI is perhaps comparable to the beginning of the nuclear age, with an even more precarious balance of terror, because the technology is in the hands of individual corporations, founded for profit, which might prove even more reckless with our lives than the authoritarian regimes of the early Cold War.
But nobody said it would be easy, so I’m going to try to point out some of the positive highlights of the week in Geneva, just to keep our motivation up, and if anybody reading this has any positive contributions to make they’re more than welcome to comment.
So let’s start:
Human Rights Council: a week of conflicts, accountability and emerging challenges
The UN Human Rights Council is now in its third week and it examined the human rights situation in Ukraine, Iran and the Russian Federation, before turning to the rights of Indigenous Peoples, reprisals against human rights defenders and other people cooperating with the UN and the latest Universal Periodic Review outcomes.
On Ukraine, Greece, like many other countries, drew attention to attacks affecting civilians and civilian infrastructure, the unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children and the recruitment of third-country nationals through coercion and deception.
The Council also looked at a very different challenge: technology-facilitated gender-based violence. It highlighted the importance of “safety, privacy and rights by design” — arguing that human rights safeguards should be built into digital products, services and algorithms from the outset, rather than addressed only after harm occurs. It also called for an international regulatory framework for the technology industry.
Discussions continued on the draft resolution on the implications of Artificial Intelligence for the promotion and protection of human rights, which was presented by a core group of countries: Egypt, Nepal, Bangladesh, Austria and Greece.
Trade and development
UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD) produced an important report - on the Palestinian economy - which finds that Gaza reconstruction requires $71.5 billion. It sets out three priorities: transferring withheld Palestinian revenues, safeguarding the banking system, and matching reconstruction support to the documented damage.
Discussions at UNCTAD's Trade and Development Board, 73rd session, highlighted that respect for international law, for the freedom of navigation and the international law of the Sea, including UNCLOS, is a global public good and a necessary condition for development. When conflict disrupts routes such as the Strait of Hormuz, every country pays, and the least developed countries pay most, though they had no part in the conflict.
The World Trade Organization - WTO's World Trade Report, launched the week before, deserves a retroactive mention, because it puts numbers on our central point. A stronger multilateral system could add about 3% to global GDP by 2050, while letting it erode could cost 5–7%. By rough estimates, the difference between those two paths could be counted in tens of millions of people, possibly a hundred million, in or out of extreme poverty. That is a strong collective incentive to do better.
Transport connectivity
Transport corridors were another focus in Geneva this week — a particularly timely discussion as disruptions around the Strait of Hormuz put the resilience of international transport routes under renewed scrutiny.
At UNECE, a high-level discussion examined the development and implementation of major inter-regional transport corridors connecting Europe and Asia, and the need for more resilient, efficient and diversified transport links. The discussion touched on a number of strategic routes, including IMEC and the Middle Corridor, as well as alternative inland transport connections in the context of the current trade disruptions.
Health security diplomacy
Strengthening international cooperation on health security is becoming increasingly critical. A roundtable hosted by the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung this week explored how this can be done but the central conclusion was clear: health threats do not stop at borders. Vulnerabilities in one health system can quickly become vulnerabilities for others — making fragmented responses insufficient. Addressing them requires coordinated action by the international community, with the WHO playing a key coordinating role.
CERN: looking ahead
CERN is my favorite and most hopeful of all the international organizations in the Geneva ecosystem. So it was a privilege to participate in the CERN Council this week, looking at the next steps for the Organization — from the future of particle physics and emerging technologies to the continued expansion of cooperation with the global scientific community. Discussions focused on the next steps towards the Future Circular Collider, CERN’s AI strategy and its engagement with quantum computing, as well as the Organization’s enlargement. Lithuania and Latvia are making rapid progress to join the CERN family, while discussions also advanced on closer association with Malta, Canada, Mexico, the Republic of Korea, Japan and South Africa.
Dear friends, this is only the tip of the iceberg of what was going on in the many layers of international Geneva during the last week, but I hope it gives you some idea of our collective potential to make a difference.
Yannis Ghikas
