September Strawberries

This year has been the summer that never was. Usually by the time the September Council session comes around, colleagues look relaxed, healthy even, after enjoying the Geneva sunshine and seem genuinely happy to see each other after a decent break. But a combination of bad weather and incessant work has left many of us looking pale, haggard and grumpy.  While the UK was enjoying one if its best summers for many a year the sun forgot to shine in Switzerland until last week. My young son is turning into a keen gardener and we thought we’d grow some fruit and vegetables for him, tending them carefully. All that we’ve had to show for our toils is three meagre strawberries in September.

The lack of sun drove me to despair, and instead of a weekend by the pool, I ended up in a local village festival, complete with Alphorn blowing, pig racing and rabbit jumping. In true Swiss democratic style the organisers let the people decided the winner of the day’s main event – the Miss Cow 2014 competition. After letting them all moo for 20 seconds about their hobbies (from what I could decipher they all spend time working for world peace and greener grass for everyone) they moved onto the beauty competition. Thankfully this was based on a flower headdress rather than how they looked in swim suits.

The summer has been particularly busy on the work front with crises across the multilateral landscape and for those who’ve been around, the September  Council session is less of a return to school than business as usual after Special Session on the situations in both Gaza and Iraq.  It was regrettable that the outcome on Gaza proved divisive. The EU’s offer of a consensus text was turned down and so the UK joined those who abstained on the resolution which established a Commission of Inquiry to investigate the many reports of violations. It will be crucial for the Commission to demonstrate an objective approach as it goes about this task in the months ahead. The Council session on violations by ISIL in Iraq saw a rare unity in approach with unanimous support for a resolution setting up an investigation by the Office of the High Commissioner into the appalling violations being perpetrated. A  couple of countries struck an odd note, questioning whether the High Commissioner’s office can carry out such investigations. It clearly can, and has been doing this ever since it was set up, so I wonder whether this is down to a lack of knowledge or if there may be malevolent intentions at play by those who don’t want the Office to be effective.

The September session looks set to add more wrinkles to faces and furrows to brows with an insanely busy workload. Council delegates seem to be their own worst enemies, forever creating new panels, running new resolutions and holding new events. During this session, there will be a record ten half-day panels in the Council plenary on top of routine business. Ten.  The end result will be far too may topics discussed superficially, with insufficient time for detailed debate on important subjects like the protection of persons deprived of their liberty  and privacy in the  digital age. The most troubling panel is likely to be on the ‘protection of the family’. While it sounds innocuous, the danger with this concept is that individual family members, especially women and children , will have their rights denied under the pretext of protecting the family. The resolution which set up the panel also did not recognise that diverse forms of the family can exist, paving the way for discrimination against those not coming from the more typical family models.

As with every session some resolutions will feature more prominently than  others. There looks set to be a further resolution on Syria, building on the strong text adopted last session which called for accountability of those responsible and had a importance reference to the international criminal court. The outcome on Sudan is less clear following the announcement by the United States at the Council’s organisational session that they intended to run a resolution. For the last few years one of the Council’s main anomalies has been that Sudan has been addressed under the Council’s agenda item 10 on technical assistance. This is appropriate for countries like Cote D’Ivoire and Central African Republic who are genuinely cooperating with the Council and the Office of the High Commissioner.  But this is not the case for Sudan and the nature and scale of violations in the country  clearly warrants  a rethink in approach.    The big “will they – wont they” this session is whether any country will be willing to take up the issue of discrimination and violence on the basis of sexual orientation. If this happens it would be enourmously significant as in recent years international progress on the rights of LGBTI people has stalled. The Council has failed to build on the breakthrough on this issue 2011 while at the national level some states have introduced new punitive measures, further restricting the rights of LGBTI people.

There will be huge interest in the first statements by the new High Commissioner for Human Rights, Prince Zeid. He will bring unique experience having been in the Balkans with UNPROFOR, and seen first-hand what happens when the UN and the international community can’t protect the most vulnerable. He will be a powerful advocate. We wish him well.

For those taking part, I wish you a good session. If you see me looking slightly frayed around the edges this is probably down to a Vitamin D deficiency as I face 3 weeks locked in underground rooms. As chance would have it, outside the sun is shining and its 26 degrees. Our strawberry season might not be over just yet.