GENEVA FORUM:
Safeguarding Multilateral Justice

The Geneva Forum on Safeguarding Multilateral Justice convenes those whose work depends on the credibility of international institutions: diplomats, scholars, jurists, humanitarian practitioners, and witnesses from the frontlines of contemporary conflict.

This forum was established on the basis of a single conviction. The international legal order established after 1945 – the United Nations Charter, the Geneva Conventions, the Genocide Convention, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, and the human rights treaty bodies – is today under unprecedented pressure. Announced wars of aggression and state-sponsored genocide are symptoms of unilateralism. This pressure is not primarily a problem of the substance of the law. It is a problem of non-compliance, of unequal application, of the suppression of voices for peace, and of attacks on the infrastructure of the institutions that interpret and enforce the law.

The Forum exists to confront that problem with the seriousness it deserves: by bringing the most informed voices into one room, by translating their analyses into concrete demands on states, and by holding the conversation open across years.

We met on 24 April – the International Day of Multilateralism and Diplomacy for Peace, proclaimed by UN General Assembly Resolution 73/127 (2018) – because that date is a legal reminder, not a ceremony.