UN Geneva director general Tatiana Valovaya speaks with Kazakh ambassador to the UN Yerlan Alimbayev during the opening of the exhibition “Ordinary Objects” on 25 April, 2022. (Credit: courtesy of Kazakhstan UN mission)

🇰🇿 The face of ‘New Kazakhstan’ in Geneva. Stories of women in Kazakhstan beaten by their sons or married to their rapists have been on display since last week in the hallways of the Palais des Nations, at UN headquarters in Geneva. The exhibition, organised by the Kazakh mission to the UN, sheds light on the hard yet too often concealed truth of domestic violence, a social phenomenon that spares no society. The initiative embodies a “new Kazakhstan” that will not hide its problems, according to the country’s ambassador to the UN, Yerlan Alimbayev. But the deadly protests from January are a reminder of the long road ahead that the country has on the human rights front.

Nigina Beroeva (Credit: Sergey Ponomarev)

🇷🇺 I wrote about people forced to flee their countries, now I have to flee mine. Nigina Beroeva is a Russian freelance photographer and journalist who has had her work published in several international as well as independent Russian and international publications including Meduza and TV channel Dozhd. After spending years reporting on refugees, never did she imagine that she would one day become one herself, as she writes below. (This photo is taken by Sergey Ponomarev, a prize-winning Russian photographer and regular contributor to publications including the New York Times).

🇺🇦 Ukraine Stories #Week11: Getting creative in fight against Russian disinformation At the beginning of the war, Ukrainian journalist Liubov Velychko applied for Territorial Defense Forces, the Ukrainian military unit for the defence of cities but his application was rejected. Instead, he decided to fight with another weapon – information. Velychko begins this week's blog by describing the work of the Creative Forces of Ukraine, a community of digital specialists fighting on the information frontlines.

An exhibition of 60 press cartoons from the world are displayed this month along the Quai President Wilson in Geneva to mark World Press Freedom Day, on Tuesday 23 May. (Credit: Kasmira Jefford)

🖊️ Nobel Prize-winning journalists to mark World Press Freedom Day in Geneva. Nobel Peace Prize laureates, journalists Maria Ressa, founder of the investigative news site Rappler in the Philippines, and Dmitry Muratov, editor-in-chief of independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta in Moscow, will be in Geneva on Tuesday to take part in the Kofi Annan Courage in Cartooning Award ceremony and a discussion on the state of press freedom in our fractured world. The Freedom Cartoonists Foundation will then hand out the 2022 Kofi Annan Courage in Cartooning Award. The event is organised by the Freedom Cartoonists Foundation and the City of Geneva in partnership with the Geneva Graduate Institute and Le Temps.

📌 3-5 May | Geneva Health Forum. Over a thousand researchers, policymakers and activists are expected to gather this week for the Geneva Health Forum – one of the first major in-person global health gatherings since the pandemic began. This year’s event will explore the inexorable links between human health and planetary health that can lead to future disease risks, as exposed by the pandemic, as well as other critical global health challenges, just ahead of the World Health Assembly. Read our article, in collaboration with Health Policy Watch here.

📌 3 May | AI in authoritarian regimes. Digital surveillance technology, such as facial recognition or the emotion detector, is progressing in authoritarian regimes but also in democracies, to the point that we are shifting towards ultra-surveillance societies.This panel, held in person at Geneva University’s Uni Dufour, will discuss how to identify potential, current or future risks and what are the limits to be expected.

For more events, visit the Genève Internationale website.