The bonfire of international law

You know the world is spinning faster when the podcasters rush back to their studios for an emergency episode.

Apologies if that sounds a little flippant, but at Inside Geneva we were quite proud of our 2025 review/2026 predictor, and yet within days, despite our analysis around cuts to United Nations funding, Gaza, Ukraine, and climate change, all topics which merit our attention, other issues burst onto the scene.

Three big things happened in scarcely more than three days, all of which are relevant to international Geneva, so journalists Nick Cumming-Bruce, Dorian Burkhalter, and I and trooped back into the studio. We were joined by Chris Lockyear, secretary general of Médecins sans Frontières/Doctors without Borders.

Our first topic, announced in the final hours of 2025, was Israel’s ban on dozens of international aid agencies. The move had been coming for some time; months ago the Israeli government told aid agencies they would face a ban if they refused to share detailed information about their staff, funding and operations.

I have talked to multiple aid agencies personally about this, and know that they have tried very hard to find a way to accommodate Israel’s demands, without compromising the safety of their staff or the impartiality of their work. As Burkhalter points out in this episode of Inside Geneva, more than 500 aid workers have been killed in Gaza, so there is understandable concern that sharing their personal details with Israel could put them at risk.

Unfortunately, attempts at negotiation failed and now some of the world’s leading humanitarian organisations, from Oxfam, to the Norwegian Refugee Council, ActionAid and Médecins sans Frontières have been ordered to stop work in Gaza and the West Bank within 60 days.

Lockyear of MSF is gravely concerned about the consequences for people in Gaza where hospitals lie in ruins. “We’re supporting one in five of the hospitals in the Gaza Strip, and one in three babies that are born in Gaza are assisted by our staff on the ground,” he told Inside Geneva. From emergency wound treatment, to physiotherapy, maternity and paediatric care, to trauma counselling, MSF has been providing it but will now have to stop.

Lockyear says he and his colleagues will continue to try to find a solution with the Israeli government that allows MSF to work, but he doesn’t sound optimistic. Despite the ceasefire in Gaza, and the promise of unfettered access for aid, Lockyear’s teams at MSF still face restrictions getting medical supplies in – sometimes it’s gauze that is denied entry, sometimes it’s fixators for setting fractures. Most of Gaza’s population still live, in this cold, wet, windy winter, in flimsy tents.

New money

The second big story we discuss on our Inside Geneve special was one US diplomats were so keen to publicise that the US mission even phoned me on the Saturday between Christmas and New Year to tell me about it. In a sudden, surprising about turn by an American administration determined to cut foreign aid funding, Washington announced $2 billion dollars for UN projects.

But was it really an about turn? As Burkhalter told us, $2 billion is just a fraction of what the United States used to invest in foreign aid. And, as we learned at a hastily arranged press conference, the money has strings attached. It is earmarked for just 17 countries, and some of the world’s most serious crises in Afghanistan and Yemen are not on that list, neither is Gaza.

Jeremy Lewin, the US official who came to Geneva, told us Washington was going to keep a very close eye on its cash. Programmes tackling the effects of climate change or ones related to equality or diversity cannot expect support. Lewin, as Burkhalter told us is “very young, a 28 year old guy, who never worked in the humanitarian sector.” In fact, much of his working life so far has been with “Doge” Elon Musk’s brutal dismantling of USAID.

Lewin, flanked by the UN’s emergency relief chief Tom Fletcher, told the UN it must “adapt or die.” What does this mean exactly? As we discuss on Inside Geneva, it’s not uncommon for countries to provide funding for particular aid projects, but the unavoidably political slant of the current US message is that the UN’s fundamental principles of helping those most in need whoever or wherever they are no longer count, and that if the UN does not “adapt” to Washington’s vision of the world, it will face further, perhaps existential attacks.

It’s all connected

Which brings us to our third topic: Venezuela. It’s no accident that four of the countries listed as lucky beneficiaries of something from the US $2 billion are El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Haiti. Apart from the last, they are not necessarily high up the UN’s humanitarian needs list – but they are of course in the western hemisphere, or “Uncle Sam’s backyard”, where Washington has now decreed that it alone holds geopolitical power and influence.

Money will flow, it seems, to places Washington wants to control, particularly in Latin American. Money will be denied to countries in great need. Although Lewin’s reason for denying support to Afghanistan was his contention that cash is diverted to the Taliban, aid agencies themselves dispute that – the real reason is more likely to be that Washington sees little benefit to itself in investing in Afghanistan, and no moral obligation, despite decades of ill thought out US intervention which only added to Afghanistan’s problems.

And yet here we are again with Venezuela; a military intervention aimed at regime change and control of the country’s oil. It’s in the western hemisphere so, US current thinking goes, it’s all perfectly legitimate. That’s not what UN human rights, and dozens of international lawyers say, they view the US action as illegal. But, as Cumming-Bruce from the New York Times, reminds us on Inside Geneva, Washington officials no longer care about what they call “international niceties.”

“The fundamental commitments to some form of international law that have underpinned western security since World War 2 are being completely abandoned by an administration that doesn’t acknowledge any accountability to anyone except itself,” says Cumming-Bruce.

The problem is, Lockyear says, ‘‘All around the world, whether they’re in Gaza, in Sudan, in Ukraine or Venezuela, there are real people who are living through the consequences of these decisions that are made in places like Washington DC and New York or in Geneva.”

Undermining fundamental principles causes damage, whether it’s denying aid agencies their right to work in crises, or cherry picking aid beneficiaries that serve not those most in need but your own political agenda, or attacking a sovereign country to create regime change. With the bleak experience of trying all these things before, in Afghanistan, or Iraq, or even way back in the 1970’s in Chile, we all know that. Sadly, some of us just don’t learn.

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