Inside Geneva: Are we throwing away international law?

On Inside Geneva this week: what does international law mean to you?

“When your government is not there to uphold your rights, it’s that safety net – to think that there’s something else out there, other sets of rules that can help right wrongs and bring about some form of justice as well,” says Kasmira Jefford, editor at Geneva Solutions. 

The Geneva conventions, bans on torture and landmines: global rules that should protect us. And international courts to ensure accountability.

“I think there's a different expectation, a different hope for international law today. We now have many rules that are far more ambitious than they used to be,” says Nico Krisch, professor of International Law at the Geneva Graduate Institute.

But do they work?

“All the justices saying X about Gaza, about Netanyahu. All the decisions of the International Criminal Court. Show me the results. Show me when Putin comes to Alaska. Show me when Netanyahu comes to the White House. How many violations can there be before the treaty or the norm becomes invalid? I think we’re seeing a level of violation that is extraordinary,” says analyst Daniel Warner.

Do governments even want the laws to work?

“I think if somebody proposed today to create an International Criminal Court, they’d be laughed at. This isn’t the diplomatic climate for such ventures,” continues Krisch.

“The way certain leaders are acting today is not sustainable. They might get away with cherry-picking parts of treaties they like best for a while, but at some point there will be a reaction. It could be climate change, it could be massive natural disasters forcing us to work together,” adds Jefford.

“We have these laws because we made some awful mistakes and committed terrible crimes. What I really hope is that we don’t have to reinvent everything because we made the same mistakes again,” says host Imogen Foulkes.

Join host Imogen Foulkes on Inside Geneva.

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For more stories on the international Geneva please visit www.swissinfo.ch/

Host: Imogen Foulkes
Production assitant: Claire-Marie Germain
Distribution: Sara Pasino
Marketing: Xin Zhang

Chapters

• 0:00 What International Law Means
• 5:10 From Nuremberg To Modern Treaties
• 11:00 Ambitious Rules, Weak Enforcement
• 16:25 Landmines, Absolutes, And Backsliding
• 22:10 Double Standards And Global South Pushback
• 28:00 The US Factor And Eroding Trust
• 33:20 Climate Justice And New Coalitions
• 38:40 Interdependence, Middle Powers, And Hope

Transcript

SPEAKER_05: 1:29

This is Inside Geneva. I'm your host, Imogen Folkes, and this is a production from SwissInfo, the international public media company of Switzerland.

SPEAKER_15: 1:42

In today's program, international law is like the ultimate rule book for countries. Think of it as the world's referee.

SPEAKER_16: 1:48

When your government is not there to uphold your rights, it's that safety net to think that there's something else out there. There are these other sets of rules that can help right wrongs and bring about some form of justice as well.

SPEAKER_13: 2:01

There's a different expectation, different hope around international law. I think today we have many rules today that are much more ambitious than they used to be.

SPEAKER_12: 2:10

Tonight, the International Criminal Court issuing arrest warrants for Israel's prime minister, his former defense minister charging them with crimes against humanity.

SPEAKER_00: 2:19

The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin because of his alleged involvement in abductions of children from Ukraine.

SPEAKER_06: 2:28

You can give me all the justices saying X about Gaza, about Netanyahu. You can give me all the decision of the International Criminal Court. Show me the results. Show me when Putin comes to Alaska. Show me when Netanyahu comes to the White House.

SPEAKER_05: 2:45

We got these laws because we made some awful mistakes and committed some terrible crimes. And what I really hope is that we don't have to reinvent all this stuff because we made the same mistakes again.

SPEAKER_13: 2:58

I think if somebody today proposed to create an international criminal court, they would be laughed at.

SPEAKER_05: 4:04

To discuss this, we have here in the studio Nico Krisch, Professor of International Law at Geneva's Graduate Institute, Kasmira Jefford, editor-in-chief of Geneva Solutions. That's a daily newsletter that is essential reading for anyone working here in Geneva, in the UN, in humanitarian agencies, and our regular analyst, Daniel Warner. Welcome to you all. I'm going to start off with a really basic question, but I think it's maybe a good idea to ask all of you what does international law actually mean to you? How would you define it? And Nico, since you're the professor, I'm going to come to you first.

SPEAKER_13: 4:46

Thanks, Imogen. On a very basic level, uh, international law is the compound of obligations that states have vis-a-vis one another, right? That's the basic and formal definition, I would say. But of course, that doesn't tell us very much. And probably it is more in a more ambitious formulation, it would be, in a sense, the rules the international community lives by, which kind of takes us from the formal territory to more an aspirational idea that somehow international law also signifies the idea of a law-based international society, which is not something we can so easily take for granted.

SPEAKER_16: 5:25

Kelsey Muiran, what about you? Well, I'll give a slightly less perhaps academic uh definition for as a as a journalist. Uh for me, I mean, I think uh international law really is uh in the auspices of the palace in Geneva, it can be quite an aloof term and and obscure and and kind of confined to everyday language that diplomats use here to negotiate treaties. But I think really more than that, it's a a living, breathing thing that people count on. It's you know, when your government uh is is not there to uphold your rights, it's that safety net, that stopgap to think that there's something else out there. There are these other sets of rules that can help right wrongs and bring about some form of justice as well. And um that's very important. I think it's a lot of very important to people out there.

SPEAKER_05: 6:14

Very something that protects us. I mine is is very basic anyway. Two things. One from quite a long time ago, my late mother-in-law, her brother, went missing over Germany. He was an RAF navigator, very sadly, three weeks before the armistice was signed. But his family knew they could contact the Red Cross and that if he was a prisoner, they would be able to send him things. And they knew that immediately that was there as something in this terrible moment. Unfortunately, he was found quite quickly that he had uh died. And the other thing is uh somebody who worked for the Red Cross when I first started in Geneva, who had uh come back from uh the Middle East, and he said international law is the barrier between us and our own barbarism. And that kind of struck me that there are just some things you shouldn't do in life, and unfortunately we all still do them, but we have these laws. Uh Danny, what about you?

SPEAKER_06: 7:16

Well, I mean, simply it's a question of what states or any organization or any person can do and can't do. But I often come back to Jan Fuller's professor statement that the law, international law, has an unfolding purpose. And the unfolding purpose is probably notions of justice. And it's unfolding in a sense, it's not static, it's not stable, but it's always changing according to what the situation is, and certainly today, as we'll discuss, the situation is changing radically.

SPEAKER_05: 7:52

One of the things I wanted to talk about, because things are very polarized and divisive today, especially on this topic, but it is eighty years since the end of the Second World War, and eight years since the Nuremberg trials.

SPEAKER_17: 8:10

Judges from Britain, America, Russia, and France assemble in Nuremberg's courthouse. Imagination sickens at the crimes laid upon the accused, now stripped of the trappings of thumb. The world's rich has run to Nuremberg, and justice waits.

SPEAKER_05: 8:26

Now, at that moment, Nico, you've probably studied this. There was a consensus, wasn't there? There should be not just accountability for the crimes committed, but that there should be a body of law which would criminalize some of these things more than they had been up to then.

SPEAKER_13: 8:44

Yeah, there was clearly a consensus in the international community, which of course did not really include the enemy states at the time, right? To create a body that would not simply execute the leaders of the defeated country, but instead put them on trial to make visible to the world what crimes they had actually committed. And the crime of aggression was, of course, among those. So that was a very decisive moment. Um, at the same time, of course, that gave birth to some broader laws. The Genocide Convention, of course, was part of the kind of that development, uh, the Geneva Conventions to an extent too, that have some criminalizing elements to them. But it took quite a while after that, actually, kind of to come back to the project of international criminal law that would really single out individuals for crimes. And that's really something that we see much more than in the 1990s happening, right? After the end of the Cold War, after the consensus to some extent had dissipated during the Cold War, and then uh there was a possibility of coming together again in more fortunate circumstances.

SPEAKER_05: 9:52

This was, I suppose, a moment of hope, wasn't it? 89 to maybe 99. What do we think? What's happened since then? What has got us to this point where we are seeing, to me, it feels like anyway, egregious devaluing of international law?

SPEAKER_06: 10:10

I think, Imogen, there are there are better moments and there are down moments. I was thinking of the Geneva Conventions, the middle of the 19th century, Libra Code in the United States dealing with the Civil War. And after that, we have World War I and World War II. And today we're at a moment where people states are less and less respecting international law. Why that came about, politicians, political scientists may answer. But the question is, is this the end of international law? Because certainly everyone agrees that we should protect certain things, especially us. The question is, how much can we impose obligations and how much can we punish?

SPEAKER_02: 10:59

The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Joav Galant for alleged war crimes in the Gaza Strip.

SPEAKER_14: 11:23

For the ICC to succeed, it needs the support of governments because its powers are limited. The power it has is for judges to take decisions.

SPEAKER_06: 11:31

There are certain people, I think of Netanyahu, I think of Putin, who are under indictments and they seem to be welcomed around the world. Can that change? Will individuals be taken to be responsible? But I think the laws are there. The question is whether they're respected and what can be done about those who violate them.

SPEAKER_05: 11:52

I suppose if we look back over the years since 1945, we do know that it's not as if we got to the early 21st century and everybody abandoned stuff they'd been obeying for decades. That's not true. I mean, we had terrible wars in the 1960s, we had Vietnam, we had the use of chemical agents, we had the invasion of Afghanistan, we had the overthrow of uh a government in Chile. So it's not as if everybody was a saint. But Casmir, I want to come to you because there's one particular treaty, and I know you're working on it at the moment, which was hailed in the 1990s as a fantastic treaty and been celebrated ever since, and that's the Convention Against Landmines. Now, I was crossing the Place des Nations last night, leaving my office, past the broken chair, which is a monument to that convention. And there were two young guys, and they'd come out of the UN behind me, and one of them said to the other, Do you know what that why why that chair has has only three legs? And the other one said, uh I don't know, just some diplomatic stuff. So here's my question. Do you think, since you're the youngest here, that the younger generation is is too far away from the consciousness of why we drafted these international laws?

SPEAKER_16: 13:13

I think uh they might not call them international laws. Um they use different vocabulary, but I I think that young people today are, and I wouldn't necessarily count myself as one of them since I'm uh a little bit older, but uh younger than us. Come on. I think people, I think young people really do care. They don't call it international law, but there's a where all we have a sense of right and wrong grounded within us. I'd like to believe we still have that, and so they uh sense when something is just inherently wrong and and uh intuitively wrong, so and are still prepared today to protest to stand up against these wrongs. So it might not be in that language, but I think there is a sense of injustice. We see it in the fight for climate justice.

SPEAKER_14: 14:04

The UN's highest court has ruled that climate change is an urgent and existential threat. The ruling came in response to a case brought by the island state of Vanuatu. The court added that failing to protect the planet from the effects of climate change could be a violation of international law.

SPEAKER_04: 14:21

Thousands of kilometers away from the Pacific Ocean. A clear and unanimous decision with far-reaching consequences for island peoples.

SPEAKER_16: 14:36

The International Court of Justice's opinion that was issued this summer, that was uh an opinion that came from a classroom in Vanuatu and some young students who decided, you know, what can international laws do for us, recognizing that climate change is a violation of our human rights. And you saw countries, I can't remember how many countries it was, but a record number of countries who were who spoke at that hearing, at those hearings at the end of last year and brought attention to that. I think I think there are still people activating those buttons and finding creative ways to make those laws work for them. Or at least maybe that's the young, the youth in me that still hopes.

SPEAKER_05: 15:17

I wonder though, and you Danny and Nico, you tell me this as well. I do wonder whether there's quite an awareness, though, that international law is based on on absolutes in some way. There is an absolute prohibition on torture. Or if you've signed up to the landmine convention, there is an absolute prohibition basically on you using the anti-personnel landmines. And yet, with the landmine convention, the argument, and we see countries withdrawing from it now, is they're in the Baltics, they have borders with Russia, is Russia is going to use them against us, so we should be able to use them against them. A few years ago, the International Committee of the Red Cross did a survey on attitudes to torture, and it was among younger people that they qualified the absolute prohibition. They said if we can get useful information that might prevent an attack, we can torture people. So I'm wondering, Nico, Danny, do you do we need more education? I think Casmira as well, what do you think?

SPEAKER_06: 16:21

I'm not sure it's education. Uh I think what's happened, uh, you want to see why we're in a different situation today. It's a question of threshold. When you have a treaty or a norm, there is a threshold that says you can't do this. Obviously, certain people states are going to violate it. How much violation can there be before the treaty or the norm becomes invalid? And I think we're seeing a level of violation that is extraordinary. And it's that level that has people saying this is disregarded, why should we be interested? Look at the people who do that and look at how many people do that. That's something I think we haven't seen.

SPEAKER_05: 17:05

Nico, do you agree with that?

SPEAKER_13: 17:06

Um Yeah, I'd agree with that, but I think there's also something broader going on. I mean, we've seen surveys, right, about the rise of anti-liberal or illiberal attitudes, and especially among younger men, I think, more than women, even. So there might be a broader shift in attitudes also kind of that makes people turn towards uh kind of softening some prohibitions. But I think there's also there's maybe something more going on, and that goes a bit to the contrast and why people are turning to, say, the International Court of Justice now, right? There's a different expectation, different hope around international law, I think, today, than there was maybe, I imagine, in the 70s or 80s. We have many rules today that are much more ambitious than they used to be. The Landmines Convention is one of them, right? People wouldn't have hoped in the 1970s to get this off the ground. It was something that could be done in the 1990s. So we have a set of ambitious rules. We have the International Criminal Court, things that also were unthinkable to an extent before.

SPEAKER_05: 18:05

But would they be thinkable now? They were thinkable in the 1990s.

SPEAKER_13: 18:09

I think if somebody today proposed to create an international criminal court, that would be laughed at.

SPEAKER_06: 19:35

Nico, not to be the New York Cynic, but that's what Imogen wants me to do. You can give me all the justices saying X about Gaza, about Netanyahu. You can give me all the decision of the International Criminal Court. Show me the results. Show me when Putin comes to Alaska. Show me when Netanyahu comes to the White House. Where are the results of the decisions being made that you claim the world was waiting to hear?

SPEAKER_05: 20:04

Well, instead, the judges are being sanctioned.

SPEAKER_08: 20:07

We start in the United States where Donald Trump has denounced the International Criminal Court, accusing it of illegitimate and baseless actions against the US and Israel.

SPEAKER_05: 20:40

American tech agarchs.

SPEAKER_16: 20:42

New word, everybody. And on that, I think the uh the ICC has its uh annual meetings this week where where it is asking itself some of these fundamental existential questions of what where its future lives, can it continue to operate next year if uh if it's continued to be hit by by sanctions and uh and also if it if its warrants prove ineffective against countries that don't uphold them. So I think that there's some big questions being asked at the moment on the future of the ICC and others. But I I was going to add before just a small point to say that also with at the same time the birth of all these treaties and talk of international law also gives The kind of violators of those laws or states' language to use to their advantage as well. I mean, it gives them a vocabulary to kind of justify their actions and their wrongs. And that's also dangerous in this world we live in today where everything is broadcast and communicated on different platforms. So that's um, you know, that's also given them also a powerful tool, whether it's, you know, Vladimir Putin justifying his invasion of Ukraine or, you know, the many other countless examples.

SPEAKER_05: 21:52

I wanted to get on to particularly the situation we're in right now, because 2025 has seen some pretty shocking things which seem to be we've always seen shocking things, but seem to be somehow tolerated more.

SPEAKER_11: 22:10

The IPC report says 16 children under the age of five have died of hunger-related causes since mid-July. It is a famine. The Gaza famine.

SPEAKER_18: 22:20

All members of the United Nations Security Council, with the exception of the US, have said that the famine in Gaza is man-made.

SPEAKER_10: 22:30

We're learning new details about one of those deadly US strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean. Sources tell CNN the US military carried out a follow-up strike on September 2nd.

SPEAKER_09: 22:40

And today we're asking, has the Trump administration committed war crimes amid reports that the US military killed two people clinging to wreckage in the sea after they survived an initial airstrike on their boat?

SPEAKER_05: 22:52

When I started this job in Geneva, it wasn't long after the United States had invaded Iraq, which we know Kofi Ann and the then Secretary General eventually said he felt it was an illegal invasion. And I I went to the World Economic Forum and Dick Cheney, the late Dick Cheney, was vice president, and he gave a speech all about America's new doctrine, and they wanted to adjust the Geneva Convention. The audience of leaders from Europe and Latin America sat on their hands. He did not get a warm welcome. And now we see with the United States, even from here in Geneva, there's been very little open condemnation of, for example, these attacks on the boats in the Caribbean. We see now the United States siding with Russia at a UN Security Council vote. And Europe is a bit squashed in the middle and a bit nervous, I think. I mean, before we started, Nico, you were saying you thought the goalposts had really been moved.

SPEAKER_13: 23:58

Yes, I think they they have been moved, maybe not for everybody. Um certainly I think that you're right. The Europeans are in a difficult position uh strategically, largely because they realize that they depend on the US to such an extent that they can be played pretty easily, right? So I think kind of that has of course lost them lots of legitimacy, especially kind of around the Gaza war, in that large parts of the rest of the world kind of see them as hypocritical, in a sense, kind of only speaking out when things happen to their friends, but not when their own friends kind of commit crimes. So I think kind of that is really a significant shift that the Western world that was always seen to be upholding those values of the international rule of law.

SPEAKER_05: 24:42

And lecturing other people.

SPEAKER_13: 24:43

And lecturing other people, that's right, kind of have turned away from it, or clearly have turned away whenever it does they don't suit them so much. So I think kind of that has shifted. I think for many others also kind of the goalposts have been moved because you cannot simply rely on law compliance anymore on so many issues. So clearly this is gonna erode the broader fabric of international law, which as Danny rightly said, right, depends on countries complying in order for there to be a sense that there is a legal system, right? There's no other enforcement of international law, typically then international public opinion and the reactions of other states. So clearly, in that sense, I think something something has changed, but it has also changed to quite some extent from Western-centric vision of the international legal order towards a range of other states in the South and in the East claiming that international law should be complied with, and with good reason, really.

SPEAKER_05: 25:54

And with justification being accused of double standards. You we hear this at the UN Human Rights Council, Casmira. You must have have heard this a lot, that the global south is just looking at the huge outcry over the invasion of Ukraine, a justified outcry, and the um the couple of whispers about Gaza. Danny, you wanted to come in.

SPEAKER_06: 26:15

Yeah, I mean, uh two short points. First, um, Imogen, it's lovely that you use the word shocking because it shows a conscience and it shows a certain understanding of values that not everyone shares. But my main point, to come back to Nico, you're talking about the West. I mean, come on, let's talk about the United States. And the role recently, under Trump specifically, dealing with multilateralism, dealing with liberal values, has had enormous impact negatively on international law. And there is no question, Nico, you said it's positive to some extent that the law is moving out of Eurocentric, but on the other hand, the United States with European allies has always been the leader in multilateralism since the Second World War. And without the United States, in this aspect, I think it's terribly damaging for the role of international law. And if you have a system in the United States today which is constantly violating international law, it's very difficult to find another country or a person who's going to be Mr. or the state that's going to be behind international law. And I think that has to be said.

SPEAKER_05: 27:32

Do you think some people say we need to get on with this without the United States? Because they're so far out of the set out of the game now.

SPEAKER_16: 27:39

I mean, they're centre of the tension, but they're not center of the world. And back to your point about the double standards, I think that's definitely the narrative we hear a lot here. But at the same time, I I spoke to Alain Delittreux, who's head of the Humanitarian and Geo Geneva Corps, that works with non-state armed groups to try and convince them to comply to international law. And he said that there wasn't one country where they're working with at the moment where the commanders don't mention Gaza as a counterexample and ask why they should respect IHL if an official army doesn't. But that doesn't mean after that that they don't then work with them to put codes of conduct in place. I think, yes, that dialogue is there. But then beyond that, I think you see developing countries still very keen to still engage with some of these mechanisms like the universal periodic review. We saw the US not turn up to its universal periodic review. They didn't show up. It's a precedent which uh many countries would not be proud of, but but there we are. No, exactly. But I think that does not mean that other countries won't um I mean the fear is that other countries will then say, well, why should we show up if the United States, the champion of democracy and the one the founders of the UN Charter isn't why should we? But I think you're still seeing countries very still keen to engage with some of these mechanisms. Do you think Nico?

SPEAKER_13: 29:03

Yeah, I mean I I think among a large part of the countries of the world, I think they are keen to continue as long as the system works reasonably well. Um but on the question of the US, I completely agree with Danny that the US has been a main pillar behind the multilateral system and certainly its construction, right? Without the US, we wouldn't have the UN at all. But at the same time, it has had an ambivalent relationship with multilateral institutions and treaties for a long, long time. If you look at the number of treaties European countries have signed compared to the number of treaties the US has signed, right? There's a big gulf there. And uh we've seen this ambivalence behind lots of negotiations and institutions. So, in a sense, it's never been merely kind of a nice and happy story. And now I think many more countries say, well, okay, so now we simply cannot count on the US anymore. If we are negotiations with them, we know that they're not going to sign this treaty. We listen to them, but because they're not gonna come on board anyway, we have to somehow carry on regardless and know that we have to do it without them. You got to the landmines convention also without the US, without the great military powers in principle, which of course may have been a birth defect of the convention from the start, but it expressed a particular moral sentiment of large parts of the world, right, to outlaw those kinds of horrible weapons. And I think kind of the sense that you, if you want to move forward, you have to somehow you have to find the right moral compass, and then you have to kind of build as large a coalition as possible around it, but it will often, at least for the moment, not include the US and not Russia. Yeah, probably.

SPEAKER_05: 30:41

Yeah, I mean, in fact, uh in the last episode of Inside Geneva, we talked about COP 30, and some of the people I talked to said it was actually easier not to have the United States there. Danny, you wanted to come in, and then I've got one last question.

SPEAKER_06: 30:53

Yeah, I mean, the question of the moral compass is a complicated one, Nico. Someone once told me a wonderful story. When the United States used to violate or do things, international law, the President or the Secretary of State would go to the legal advisor to the State Department and say, I'm gonna do this, justify it. Now they don't even ask. And that's a fundamental change. Fundamental change. And I think the world looks at that and the double standard that committed. That's the double standard. Why should we do it when look what they're doing? Therefore, there's not a leader today who is the moral compass and says, no, this is totally unacceptable. We don't even have the Swiss defending the Geneva Conventions as I think they ought to. So we have a lack of leadership here, and I think there's something negative there, Nico, in terms of promoting international law.

SPEAKER_05: 31:46

You said about what's changed and not asking whether we can do this or not. While I was preparing for this podcast, I was reading about this book by Giuliano da Empoli, The Hour of the Predator, and what he's writing about, and I have to be honest, I haven't read the whole thing, that there is a new populist class of political predators and digital conquistadors. What a phrase, huh? And he basically is arguing that these people bonded together, and we have seen that in the United States, haven't we? With the business community, the political class and the tech giants, that they are basically saying there's a load of stuff we just don't need, like an independent judiciary, and international law wouldn't fall into that. So I'm just wondering, we should offer our listeners some optimism at the end of the show. Is that what's coming? And is it a bad thing? Or are we going to be able to hang on to these, I mean, these fundamental principles, which I thought they were fundamental and were sticking around. Who wants to go first?

SPEAKER_06: 32:49

I mean, you raise the question, Imogen, of the thin line between the public and the private. What I think is positive is that we're living in a world that's more and more interdependent. If a flood happens in Asia, if a starvation famine happens in another region, we all know about it. So in that sense, the complex interdependency we're seeing means that we have to react one way or another to what's going on. Therefore, because we're more cosmopolitan, there has to be basic fundamental ways that the world, the system, has an order. We're in a certain sense in anarchy today about certain things, but certain things function. And I think that interdependence will lead us out of the problems we have today to something more positive.

SPEAKER_16: 33:41

Well, that is that at least is positive. Casmira, you got your hand up. I'm I'm piggybacking on that because I do think that the way that certain leaders today are acting is not sustainable. And so perhaps for a certain time we can do away with cherry-picking bits of treaties and laws that they like best. But at some point there's gonna be a reaction to that, and at that point we're gonna have to need to fill that void, and it's gonna be climate change, it's gonna be massive natural disasters where we're forced to work together, and there's no denying that. I mean, he can deny climate all he wants, but there's gonna be some point where even the United States is going to need help from other nations. Nico, you've been waiting.

SPEAKER_05: 34:20

You had your hand up first.

SPEAKER_13: 34:21

Oh, so so many things to to say. Well, and kind of clearly I'm not in the great mood for optimism, I have to say. If you ask us to be optimistic, but uh how optimistic can we be, right? If over the last 15 years Freedom House has reported a decline in democratic values across the world kind of year after year. I think there's a serious crisis of liberal democracy, of the idea of rights, of protections, of popular participation that we have to face. And that will reflect into international law, international institutions. So I think kind of that's something we is probably going to shape much of the law that we see, and it might not be the best law that we might imagine, right, if we come from a liberal democratic perspective. At the same time, I think because of that interdependence, countries need to cooperate somehow. Now, one shouldn't think that just because we have interdependence, countries immediately cooperate, right? There's still a large step to be made. Climate, clearly, kind of a sort of a very big uh big problem that we're not tackling as much. But clearly, lots of countries have a need and a will to cooperate. And also a language, right? Sort of I was at a conference in China a couple of months ago, and of course, everybody was talking about as if multilateralism was the only thing that you can talk about in foreign policy. Now, however, one might take it with a grain of salt, but uh nevertheless, there is still much more of a rhetoric than you see in the US, where taking the word international law into your mouth makes sure that you're not going to be heard in the administration. So, kind of you don't want to want to do that. I think really kind of the turn from interdependence to cooperation will come primarily from countries that are not the great powers. They can often do without others, or they think they can do without others. Probably they cannot, but it takes them longer to see that. But it's smaller and middle powers, I think, kind of that are likely to carry whatever will come next. And then hopefully we'll get the others somewhere on board. But for them, it is much more crucial to work with others in order to solve the problems they have. They simply cannot go it alone.

SPEAKER_05: 36:24

Well, I second that. I I also think that there's going to have to be more cooperation of the like-minded when it comes to these fundamental standards. I also want to leave on a note of optimism, but I am worried. I am worried about this predator populist big tech, that this grouping doesn't seem to have time for the law unless it suits them. And that would include international law and the basic international human rights law. I'm reminded where we started with the Second World War, that we got these laws because we made some awful, awful, awful mistakes and committed some terrible crimes. And what I really hope is that we don't have to reinvent all these stuff because we made the same mistakes again. But let's hope not. The fact that we're even here sitting talking about it is a good sign. That brings us to the end of this edition of Inside Geneva. Thank you all very much. Danny Warner, Nico Krisch, Casmira Jefford. Next time on Inside Geneva, just a little reminder: despite all the cuts in humanitarian funding, there are aid workers posted all over the world who in December, many of them will be spending their time away from their families and their friends and their homes because they are working in places like Ukraine or in South Sudan. And we're going to be hearing from three of them. So tune in on the 23rd of December for a holiday special. I'm Imogen folks. Thanks for listening. A reminder you've been listening to Inside Geneva, a Swiss Info production. You can subscribe to us and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Check out our previous episodes how the International Red Cross unites prisoners of war with their families, or why survivors of human rights violations turn to the UN in Geneva for justice. I'm Imogen Folks. Thanks again for listening.