QUNO Geneva's Peace & Disarmament program works on highlighting the arms-related risks to human rights and tackling the challenges in addressing these risks by building effective arms controls at the international level. Read more about how we do that in this booklet.
QUNO Geneva’s annual Quaker UN Summer School (QUNSS) hosted 23 participants from various countries recently, connecting them to the United Nations eco-system. Participants gathered from July 3 to 14 at Quaker House in Geneva. Their open-mindedness, curiosity, and willingness to learn meant this year’s cohort was brimming with rich questions that inspired multiple in-depth discussions. This year was the first in-person QUNSS since Covid-19 started in early 2020. It was also one of the most diverse in QUNSS gatherings in its history, due in part to bursary support from Quakers in Britain and Switzerland. Participants, aged 19 to 27, joined QUNO Geneva from 12 different countries: Bolivia, Cyprus, Ghana, Jordan, Kenya, South Africa, Switzerland, Togo, Uganda, the United Kingdom, the United States of America and Vietnam. They also came from diverse faith, cultural, and economic backgrounds. Over the programme’s two weeks, participants were introduced to topics connected to QUNO’s work, engaged in educational role-play exercises, spoke to experts on some of the world’s most pressing issues, and visited multiple international organisations in person. During the first week, participants were introduced to QUNO, the UN system, and how QUNO’s work embodies Quaker values in multilateral spaces. A visit to the Human […]
Florence Foster, Representative for Peace & Disarmament at QUNO Geneva, had the pleasure of joining Irish Friends in Tallaght for Ireland Yearly Meeting 2023 on ‘Building Community Together’, and was invited to speak on ‘Preparing for Peace: How can we prepare for peace?’ alongside Iain Atack. Her intervention outlined how Quaker witness at the multilateral level prepares for peace – outlining how QUNO’s history and methods are embedded in the hopes of and for peace. Importantly, QUNO’s work finds its root in the belief that we must value each individual and seek to reach that spark of good, vision, or willingness to risk, that resides in each person. This can be found in the diverse ways in which QUNO approaches and shapes activities behind the scenes, building trust, reducing conflict and advancing the reconciling of difference by bringing together people from a range of backgrounds including diplomats, UN officials, staff of non-governmental organizations, academics, experts and practitioners. Florence also gave an example of the work she leads as the Representative for Peace & Disarmament. She insisted that QUNO continues to resist all war and preparations for war and believes that the deliberate killing of others denies their humanity – balancing […]
During the 11th UN Forum on Business and Human Rights | OHCHR, QUNO Geneva partnered with American Bar Association Center for Human Rights, the University of Washington School of Law, PAX and Amnesty International to co-organize a virtual side event titled “Responsible Business Conduct – the case of the arms sector”. The conversation spotlighted an important governance gap in both the business and human rights, and arms control communities of practice – namely, the roles and responsibilities of the arms industry. Although there are frameworks such as, the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (see also their Information Note on the Arms Industry), which outline the human rights responsibilities of businesses, and international treaties, such as the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), which regulates the international trade in conventional arms and focuses more on the role of states in this process, there is a blind spot on the human rights responsibilities of the arms sector and companies throughout a weapons’ s life cycle. To address this gap, the discussion centred around 3 key questions: What type of effective practices do businesses already use to prevent or mitigate human rights impacts of transferred arms? And how should these effective practices […]
At the 51st session of the Human Rights Council – which has come to a close – the Peace and Disarmament programme engaged on two key thematic areas of work: sustaining peace and arms control. QUNO’s work on Peace and Disarmament is rooted in the understanding that sustainable peace is a holistic process, linked with human rights, social and economic justice, and political participation. This understanding also underpins our engagement at the Council – where we continue to call for more effective and coherent cooperation across all pillars of the UN – namely the human rights, development, and peace & security pillars. We reiterated this call in our Item 3 statement – highlighting our continued wish for member states of the HRC and Peacebuilding Commission (PBC) to continue to work together to develop opportunities for further exchange and dialogue, and to work towards enabling an annual briefing by the PBC chair to the HRC. In line with this understanding of sustainable peace, the programme continues to support ways in which the HRC explores its prevention mandate. The programme therefore also engaged on Resolution 51/14 on the role of prevention in the promotion and protection of human rights focused on accountability […]