Thursday, Week 1 – UN and Red Cross Visits

On Thursday, students met outside the Visitor’s gate of the Palais de Nations to go inside the UN office of Geneva for lecture by Patrick McCarthy, one of the leading experts on multilateral disarmament negotiations.

He discussed how we can improve human security through disarmament and arms control.  The first part of the lecture focused on the Conference on Disarmament (CD). The second part provided students with an understanding of the rationale behind international efforts to ban or regulate specific weapons systems, as well as with an overview of important ongoing negotiations on regulating the international arms trade.  

Key points:

• Disarmament as humanitarian action 

• Why are some weapons banned, some regulated and others not (yet)

• Balancing the military utility of weapons with their humanitarian impact

We sat in a negotiating room for the lecture, and our students asked great questions that had some technological or cultural aspects, such as how new the development of new technologies, like nanotechnology, can be considered in disarmament talks, or prevented from being developed via a multilateral negotiations process.

We were unfortunately unable to observe the UN conference on disarmament, as it had been canceled at the last minute, but we had a longer session with Dr. McCarthy including a brief tour of the UN building and assembly room.  

That afternoon, students gathered for a group photo in front of the UN then went to the International Committee of the Red Cross for a lecture.  

Here’s a summary of the afternoon from Ashley Anderson, the TA for the summer program: Alexandre Liebeskind presented on Kenya–a country that was traditionally seen as stable in East Africa after 1993–and post-election cooperation. Laurent Gisel presented us with the basics of international humanitarian law: what IHL is, how it is different from and similar to human rights law, the basic principles of IHL, and the challenges of IHL before presenting IHL in the context of terrorism.