Maxime Canals, curator of collections at the Société de Lecture (Geneva Solutions/Michelle Langrand)

📖 Société de Lecture wants to offer ‘quality cultural encounters’ for international Geneva. War, AI and banking empires are among the themes covered by this autumn’s programme of conferences as the literary institution seeks to hook Geneva’s international crowd.

🇨🇭The ICRC reinvents its cyber future, but not in Switzerland. While facing an unprecedented financial crisis, the ICRC is setting itself up as a global laboratory for technical innovation and has chosen Luxembourg as the place to do it – a missed opportunity for Geneva and Bern, Zurich-based media Republik reports in this article translated by Geneva Solutions.

💬 UN labour chief: ‘Switzerland must do everything it can to ratify workplace violence convention’. Gilbert Houngbo, director general of the International Labour Organization, urges Switzerland, home to international Geneva, to ratify the agreement that has divided parliament and addresses the challenges ahead in a fast-changing world of work.

🧠 Neurotech: should our brains have rights? As technology unlocks the doors to our minds, scientists invited by a Human Rights Council advisory committee set up to look into emerging challenges in the field of neurotech urge for human rights protection.

Olga Algayerova, executive secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Europe

🇺🇳 Olga Algayerova: ‘It’s a loss for the region if we cannot cooperate’. Olga Algayerova is wrapping up her term as executive secretary of the UN’s Economic Commission for Europe. Two weeks ahead of stepping down, she spoke to Geneva Solutions about the hardships of leading technical cooperation in a region crippled by climate change, Covid and debt as well as fractured by war.

Youth representatives outside the UN headquarters in New York during the General Assembly, September 2022. (Credit: Global Student Forum/ X)

🎥 ‘At the UN, young people want to do more than smile for the cameras’. Too often, young people are invited to speak on the global stage but remain sidelined from making the decisions that will shape their future, writes youth activist Henry Davidkhanian Wright on International Youth Day.

🪖Africa: those willing to sacrifice democracy for stability will have neither. Earlier this week when the military ended 56 years of the Bongo family dynasty in the African state of Gabon, it was just the latest coup d’état to take place since 2020. Just like with other recent precedents in Niger, Sudan, Mali and Burkina Faso and Guinea, the overthrow in Gabon must be condemned in the strongest terms, writes Corinne Momal-Vanian, executive director of the Geneva-based Kofi Annan Foundation.

Rifaat Assad, the exiled uncle of Syrian President Bashar Assad speaks during an interview with The Associated Press in his office in Marbella, southern Spain, 27 May, 2005. (AP Photo/Paul White, File)

Geneva Solutions’s monthly “war criminal hunt” in collaboration with the Geneva-based NGO Civitas Maxima.

Switzerland weighs in on elusive quest for justice over Syria Hama massacre. This month we learnt that last year, Switzerland’s Federal Criminal Court (FCC) ordered an international arrest warrant against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s uncle in connection with war crimes committed in the city of Hama in 1982. Rifaat Al-Assad, dubbed “the butcher of Hama”, was staying in a five-star hotel in Geneva when Geneva-based NGO Trial International filed the complaint against him in 2013. His presence in Switzerland, however brief, was enough to trigger the exercise of universal jurisdiction.

By the time the Swiss authorities managed to act definitively on the case and issue the international warrant, Rifaat al-Assad had already left France, where had been investigated for, charged, and convicted with financial offences, and returned to Syria. It remains to be seen whether he will ever stand trial in Switzerland for his alleged crimes. This whole process also begs the question as to why France and Switzerland could not have collaborated to prevent al-Assad from fleeing France right under the nose of the authorities. Nevertheless, for his victims, this warrant, thanks to the tenacity of a Geneva NGO, remains a significant step forward in obtaining accountability for these crimes.

- Alain Werner, director of Civitas Maxima