19th September 2016 Geneva, Switzerland
I’m afraid I have to begin on a very sad note as our friend and colleague Ebenezer Appreku, the Deputy Permanent Representative of Ghana, passed away just before the session. He was a wonderful man and a strong human rights advocate. I often heard him speak about how critical attention by the UN had helped […]
20th June 2016 Geneva, Switzerland
In the months since the last Council session, Star Wars has come to dominate my home life. My son asks endless questions about the characters, while the rest of the family begrudgingly take turns to act them out. I’m most often cast as Jabba the Hutt while my Jedi son brandishes his light sabre and […]
21st March 2016 Geneva, Switzerland
Sorry for last week’s silence. A bout of family flu and some absent colleagues kept me busier than usual but thankfully everyone’s fine again. The middle two weeks of the Council session have been typically frantic with everyone trying to work out the version of their resolutions to table which they hope will attract the […]
7th March 2016 Geneva, Switzerland
Aftershave. Make-up. Back hair. At some point during our adolescence we realise that less is usually more and adjust our personal grooming behaviour accordingly. Despite my awkward formative years, even I managed to understand that aftershave was not to be applied by the bottle (though I never worried much about my make-up). The Council turns […]
1st March 2016 Geneva, Switzerland
Welcome back. I hope you’ve been having a good 2016. By this stage of the year most people’s well intentioned New Year’s resolutions have fallen by the wayside as the demands of winter force us towards the comforting embrace of familiar habits. I spend too much of my working life working on resolutions at the […]
5th October 2015 Geneva, Switzerland
Just before the session began, someone told me about Mike the chicken who somehow managed to survive for 18 months despite being headless. There’s been more than a few times over the last year and a half when I’ve known how he felt. The demands of trying to work with a young family and badly […]
28th September 2015 Geneva, Switzerland
However it happens, giving birth to a resolution at the UN is always difficult. In olden times, when the Human Rights Council was but a twinkle in the eye of former Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the process remained unchanged down the generations. Drafts were put together in foetal form by aspiring parent delegations, and then discussed […]
21st September 2015 Geneva, Switzerland
So Bob asked me to guest blog for him this week. There were two ways I could approach this; try and write like Bob, with jokes about cats and the trials of combining domesticity with working at the Human Rights Council. Or, cut my own path. So here goes: I’m now in my 5th year […]
7th July 2015 Geneva, Switzerland
UN diplomats spend much of their lives fretting about securing exactly the right words in international documents. I’ve seen a whole day of negotiations conclude with only a comma added, to mutual back-slapping and a general sense of a job well done, and have spent weeks painfully debating the insertion of a footnote or an […]
29th June 2015 Geneva, Switzerland
It’s been a tiring week. The middle part of the Council session is always hectic as delegates scramble to finalise the version of the resolutions that they want to table by Thursday’s deadline. But my sleep levels have taken a heavier battering than normal thanks to the Women’s World Cup, taking place in Canada’s far-off […]