UN Geneva Secretary General Tatiana Valovaya delivering opening comments at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, 25 January 2022. (Credit: Tatiana Valovaya)

🔒 Unlocking Geneva's disarmament talks The Conference on Disarmament (CD) began its 2022 session in Geneva last month, with hopes of breaking the years-long deadlock further marred by Covid delays and escalating geopolitical tensions over Ukraine. As delegates prepare to meet again this week, can this year’s conference deliver a different outcome?

Alva Myrdal chairing the Conference on Disarmament in 1970. (Credit: UN photo)

Disarmanent’s Nobel prize-winning champion. Alva Myrdal was a Swedish diplomat and politician who won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1986 for her many years of work in the field of disarmament. She held several prominent roles within the UN system, including as Sweden’s representative to the Geneva disarmament conference, which she chaired in 1970. During the negotiations in Geneva, she played an active role, emerging as the leader of the group of non-aligned nations which put pressure on the superpowers, the US and the former USSR, to show greater concern for concrete disarmament measures.

📌 9 February | Meet the Human Rights Council’s presidents. Ahead of the first HRC session of 2022. NGOs and diplomats from Geneva’s human rights circles will meet with the council’s outgoing president Fiji’s ambassador Nazhat Shameem Khan and her replacement Argentina’s ambassador Federico Villegas. An annual meet up in person, the welcoming event will take place online for the second year in a row for Covid reasons.

📌 7-25 February | UN women rights committee to review eight countries. The Committee on the Elimination of Descrimination Against Women (CEDAW) will evaluate Uganda, Panama, Peru, Lebanon, Gabon, Dominican Republic, Senegal and Uzbekistan on issues ranging from reproductive rights, to equal pay to prostitution. Abortion will likely come up as all countries except Uzbekistan have restrictive laws on the practice and the committee has told countries in the past to decriminalise the termination of a pregnancy. The 23 independent experts that make up the committee will gather in UN headquarters in Geneva to question the eight governments via Zoom.

For more events, visit the Genève Internationale website.