GENEVA (AN) — The United Nations Security Council marked the 75th anniversary of the landmark 1949 Geneva Conventions with a tour aimed at reaffirming international humanitarian law.
Invited by Switzerland, a member of the 15-nation council until the end of the year, diplomats on the powerful U.N. panel paid an informal visit to Geneva on Monday to meet with technical experts in conflict prevention. Switzerland will hold the council's monthly rotating presidency in October.
Earlier this month, the International Committee of the Red Cross, or ICRC, marked the 75th anniversary of its role as guardian of the four Geneva Conventions and their additional protocols in 1977 and 2005 that form the bedrock of international humanitarian law, or IHL.
The four treaties, adopted at an international conference on August 12, 1949, are commonly referred to as the rules of war. They protect civilians and those who can no longer engage in conflict, such as wounded and sick soldiers and prisoners of war.
They have been ratified or acceded to by virtually all nations, and also include rules relating to humanitarian access that are frequently referred to when discussing the protection of civilians.
The council visit included a look at the chamber where the first Geneva Convention was signed and a discussion in the U.N.'s European headquarters at the Palais des Nations co-hosted by Switzerland and Sierra Leone, the council president this month. Sierra Leone's Foreign Minister Timothy Musa Kabba and Swiss Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis participated, along with ICRC President Mirjana Spoljaric Egger.
"The Geneva Conventions save lives, but it takes political will for full implementation," Egger said. "It is evident that despite the universal backing, non-compliance remains a serious problem. Even when parties claim to respect IHL, permissive interpretations hinder its effectiveness. And I want to be clear: We have no reason to celebrate. But this is the time to remind ourselves why the Geneva Conventions were established in 1949. All states, and notably the members of the Security Council, must do their part to halt the current downward spiral. Because the risk of further escalation is particularly dangerous in the polarized and, at the same time, highly interconnected world of today."
Kabba emphasized that the principles enshrined in the Geneva Conventions are "moral imperatives," not just legal obligations, and reflect our shared humanity.
"In the 1990s, Sierra Leone went through a horrendous civil war during which most of the cardinal principles of the Geneva Conventions were violated," said Kabba. "However, and this is very important throughout that conflict, that we were kept constantly reminded that those principles truly mattered. And the most important driving force behind establishment of the Geneva Conventions – the International Committee of the Red Cross, ICRC, was constantly supporting the victims of those violations."
"I stand here today as a former child soldier, forcefully recruited during the civil conflict that decimated over 50,000 of my compatriots," he added. "It was the ICRC which profoundly helped me to overcome through several interventions, both physical, practical and psychological, from the trauma of my war experience and to be reabsorbed into normal society."
Gap between 'normative framework and the realities'
Cassis noted that the anniversary has "an alarming international context: more than 120 armed conflicts are ongoing in the world."
"There is Sudan, whose ceasefire talks are currently taking place near here.
There is also Ukraine, Yemen and the Middle East, to name just a few of the current conflicts that neither multilateralism nor international law have been able to prevent, let alone resolve," he said. "These wars cause unimaginable levels of human suffering and an increase in humanitarian crises."
Cassis said the U.N.'s top council is responsible for protecting civilians in armed conflicts, one of Switzerland's priorities. "International humanitarian law cannot simply be a law written on the paper of our good conscience," he said. "Our voices must be powerful enough – and convincing – for its echo to resonate all the way to the battlefield. ... It is up to us to set an example."
Other sessions, led by Swiss State Secretary Alexandre Fasel, covered satellites, data, and climate security. They included the U.N. Satellite Centre, World Meteorological Organization, U.N. Environment Program, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, and Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator Foundation, or GESDA.
At GESDA's headquarters in Campus Biotech, Swiss State Secretary Alexandre Fasel and GESDA board members Henrietta Fore and Michael Hengartner emphasized that scientific anticipation and expected advances in technology, including artificial intelligence, quantum computing and synthetic biology, can help prevent conflicts and promote security.
The visit included 14 of the council's current 15 members: Algeria, China, Ecuador, France, Guyana, Japan, Malta, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Slovenia, South Korea, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. Russia declined to attend.
Switzerland, which traditionally claimed neutrality in European conflicts, adopted European Union sanctions against Russia after its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Russia's deputy U.N. ambassador, Dmitry Polyanskiy, last week called the visit a "waste of money, resources and time."
The council is supposed to maintain international peace and security. Though it consistently refers to humanitarian law in its resolutions, "the existing gap between the growing normative framework and the realities experienced by civilians in conflict-affected contexts across the world has remained, if not widened, in the past five years," the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs concluded in a policy brief this year.
