The MSF team walks through Pie de Pato, Chocó, towards a training day for community agents on 8 March 2023. (Geneva Solutions/Daniela Díaz Rangel)

Aid groups partner up with Indigenous communities in Colombia as conflict rages on. “We can’t hunt. We can’t care for our crops,” said Arsenio, the leader of Puerto Alegre, a small Emberá indigenous community in the Alto Baudó region of Chocó in northwestern Colombia. He was referring to how ongoing fighting has left thousands of Emberá under “forced confinement” – lockdowns or movement restrictions imposed by armed groups. In Colombia’s Pacific region, ongoing armed conflict in isolated areas has spurred international aid groups to rethink how to ensure access to vulnerable populations by training locals to respond to needs.

🗳️The Human Rights Council 🗳️The Human Rights Council will wrap up on Tuesday after voting on several resolutions, most of which are a standard renewal of past proposals. These include one by Haiti asking for judicial and security assistance as the country grapples with soaring levels of gang violence and implicitly referencing its calls for international military intervention. It also requests that a UN expert be appointed to monitor the human rights situation in the country five years after its bid to end the mandate of the former independent expert, Gustavo Gallón.

😷Pandemic treaty talks resume today at the World Health Organization (WHO), where countries will continue to discuss the zero draft, an initial proposal released last month that revealed diverging views on how the world should address future global health crises.

Russia-Ukraine war: what are the risks of escalation? One year since Russia invaded Ukraine, could the war extend beyond the country’s borders and should Vladimir Putin’s threats of using nuclear weapons be taken seriously? What does the future look like for Ukrainians who have fled the violence?

Geneva Solutions, in partnership with Le Temps and the Geneva Press Club, will debate these questions with Ukrainian ambassador to Switzerland Iryna Venediktova, the assistant high commissioner for protection with the UN Refugee Agency Gillian Triggs and other high-level experts and civil society actors at a panel on 4 April at Domaine de Penthes in Geneva.