The world is marking 30 years since the Rwandan genocide. Inside Geneva talks to those who witnessed it.

“We came to one village where there were a few survivors and a man came to me with a list and said ‘look, the names have been crossed out one by one, entire families, they were killing everybody from those families,’” says Christopher Stokes, from Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders).

Charles Petrie, former United Nations (UN) humanitarian coordinator, recalls: “She thought there was a good chance that the Interahamwe [militia] would find the kids, the children, and she said, ‘pray that they don’t hack them to death, pray that they shoot them’”.

Why was it not prevented?

“The paralysis of the UN system, the paralysis of all the major players to respond to what was pretty clearly a massive genocidal operation,” says Gareth Evans, former Australian foreign minister.

Senior diplomats worked to make the UN stronger in the face of atrocities.

“Instead of talking about the right to intervene, we talked about the responsibility to protect. There are some kinds of behaviour which are just inconceivably beyond the pale, whatever country we live in, and just do demand this response,” says Evans.

Has “responsibility to protect”, or R2P, worked?

“I don’t think there’s been significant progress. I would say actually that we went from perhaps a hope, an illusion that something would be done to actually not expecting anything at all now,” says Stokes.

Join host Imogen Foulkes on the Inside Geneva podcast.

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In Inside Geneva this week we get an eyewitness account of a mission to supply Gaza’s hospitals.

Chris Black, World Health Organisation: ‘People have told me oh you must be very brave for going to Gaza. I don’t think so, I think what’s brave is the people who have been doing this work since early October, and who go back every day, to do it again and again and again.’

Aid agencies say nowhere is safe in Gaza

Chris Black, World Health Organisation: ‘A woman with her young child saying to me, are we safe here? And I wanted to say to her ‘You’re in the grounds a hospital, this is a protected space, you should be safe here’. But I couldn’t say to her ‘you’re safe here.’’

And we hear from human rights defenders who have come to Geneva, hoping for support.

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, human rights defender, Belarus: ‘I really believe that the democratic, powerful world will its teeth and will show to dictators that they will not prevail. We are not asking you to fight instead of us, we are asking you to help us fight the dictators.’

Are democracies letting human rights defenders in autocratic states down?

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

Please listen and subscribe to our science podcast -- the Swiss Connection.

Get in touch!

• Email us at insidegeneva@swissinfo.ch
• Twitter: @ImogenFoulkes and @swissinfo_en

Thank you for listening! If you like what we do, please leave a review or subscribe to our newsletter.

In 2024, four billion of us can vote in elections. Can democracy survive artificial intelligence (AI)? Can the UN, or national governments, ensure the votes are fair?

“Propaganda has always been there since the Romans. Manipulation has always been there, or plain lies by not very ethical politicians have always been there. The problem now is that with the power of these technologies, the capacity for harm can be massive,” says Gabriela Ramos, Assistant Director-General for Social & Human Sciences & AI Ethics at UNESCO.

Analyst Daniel Warner continues: “I’m worried about who’s going to win. But I’m also worried about whether my vote will count, and I’m worried about all kinds of disinformation that we see out there now. More than I’ve ever seen before.”

Are deep fakes the biggest dangers? Or just not knowing what to believe?

“I think the problem is not going to be the content created, the problem is going to be the liar’s dividend. The thing that everything can be denied, and that anything can be questioned, and that people will not trust anything,” said Alberto Fernandez Gibaja, Head of Digitalisation and Democracy at the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA).

Laws to regulate AI are lagging behind the technology. So how can voters protect themselves?

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

Please listen and subscribe to our science podcast -- the Swiss Connection.

Get in touch!

• Email us at insidegeneva@swissinfo.ch
• Twitter: @ImogenFoulkes and @swissinfo_en

Thank you for listening! If you like what we do, please leave a review or subscribe to our newsletter.