26th February 2016 Geneva, Switzerland
I am not your typical intern. I am about to turn 35, I have 2 children aged 5 and 3, and a previous career as a Barrister. I traded in late night briefs, daily court advocacy and negotiations, and challenging clients for the trials and tribulations of child rearing and home making. Eighteen months ago […]
23rd February 2016 Geneva, Switzerland
Like all governments and international organisations, the UN sometimes gets a bad press. Recently the UN faced critical headlines following the release of an opinion by the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention that Julian Assange was being arbitrarily detained in the UK. Now, the decision to conclude that someone who is evading Swedish justice by […]
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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 […]
21st September 2015 Geneva, Switzerland
In December 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Referring to a covenant that was by then already well over 700 years old, Eleanor Roosevelt welcomed the Declaration by saying she hoped it would become a Magna Carta for the world. Many today still argue that these fundamental rights enshrined […]
16th September 2015 Geneva, Switzerland
I hope you had a good break. Those wise enough to spend their holidays in or around these parts will be coming back to the Council re-energised from the unusually long hot summer we’ve had this year. To my family’s bemusement, I opted to spend our holidays caravanning in the slightly more inclement weather which […]
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 […]
14th June 2015 Geneva, Switzerland
It feels like we’ve hardly been away. I’m starting to suspect that someone has airbrushed April and May from the global calendar. The only clue that the months have been and gone is our hedge growing high enough to receive a letter from the estate agent ordering us to cut it by 10 centimetres and […]
11th May 2015 Geneva, Switzerland
Grahame Greene’s novel about Geneva ignores it, focusing instead on the nasty foibles of the very rich. And if they mention it at all, modern novelists writing about Geneva use the UN at best as a backdrop for international intrigue but more often as a metaphor for international impotence. For someone preparing to take up […]