19th September 2011 Geneva, Switzerland
It’s been a tiring week. The Council has been busy enough but it hasn’t helped that our 6-month old seems to have lost the knack of sleeping at night for more than about 30 minutes at a time. My own dad, over from the UK, sees this as his own private revenge for the years […]
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12th September 2011 Geneva, Switzerland
I’ve never liked this time of year. It always invokes my childhood dread of going back to school without having done any of my homework for the summer holidays. Each year I promised myself I’d change and be more organised the following summer. But I never was. On Monday the Human Rights Council begins its […]
19th July 2011
The red carpet heaves with talent including John Malkovich, Russian filmmaker and actor Nikita Mikhalkov and many legendary Odesa comedy stars including the “Masks” of Chaos Shakespeare fame. Above, gleaming gilt cherubs frolic. I’m at the fabulous Odesa opera house for the opening of this year’s Odesa International Film Festival. With six British films on […]
14th July 2011
You don’t get much better people-to-people links than by bringing a group of British and Ukrainian young people together to play football on the beach, explore theatre projects and check out urban regeneration and diversity. Those were some of the results of a recent visit organised by the British Council with the Churches’ Regional Commission […]
24th June 2011 Geneva, Switzerland
Life is full of unwritten rules which help determine the limits of acceptable behaviour and which help you avoid making embarrassing and sometimes costly mistakes. The peculiar world of the Human Rights Council is no exception. No one tells you these little bits of conventional wisdom like, don’t deliver the first 2 minutes of your […]
6th June 2011 Geneva, Switzerland
There’ve been some major changes since I last updated my blog. I’ll start with the most important, which is that I became a dad for the first time in early March. Funnily enough, my son Ben was born on the Human Rights Council’s annual day on the rights of the child which has reinforced an […]
6th June 2011
I spent early Friday at the Hungarian-Chinese bilingual School of Budapest. They, together with 9 other schools, were participating in a “Connecting Classrooms” Festival event at the end of this academic year. Connecting Classrooms is a British Council global project which aims to build lasting partnerships between schools in the UK and others around the […]
10th May 2011
Of what 47-member body is Ukraine about to assume the Chairmanship, followed by the United Kingdom? The answer is of course the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe (CoE), whose Chairmanship Ukraine will take on on 11 May. The UK, in turn, takes over the chairmanship from Ukraine in November. CoE Chairmanships are […]
24th March 2011
The Informal Environment Council taking place in Gödöllő on 25-26 March has an exciting agenda even if it doesn’t have a snappy title. This is for several reasons. The topics for discussion are water and climate policy – an appropriate combination from Hungary’s point of view. Because focusing on water issues seems to be able […]
8th March 2011 Geneva, Switzerland
Guest blog by Jacqui Hunt, Equality Now This session of the Human Rights Council sees the appointment of a new mechanism to promote women’s rights – a working group to focus on discrimination against women in law and practice. A significant milestone in respect of women’s rights of which the Human Rights Council should be […]