When in 1937 the League of Nations vacated the 225-room Palais Wilson in Geneva, the global intergovernmental body created to preserve peace after World War 1 was on its last legs. It died soon afterwards with World War 2.<\/p>\n
This summer the league\u2019s successor, the UN, is set to abandon the same building as it and other global bodies in the Swiss city are increasingly sidelined by funding cuts and a US government that is turning its back on multilateralism.<\/p>\n
Since 2025, more than 3,000 Geneva-based jobs at the UN and international organisations have been cut or are transferring to cheaper locations, including about a fifth of UN posts, a Reuters survey of a dozen agencies and local authorities showed.<\/p>\n
The UN human rights arm, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, is moving from the Palais Wilson to a wing of Geneva\u2019s UN headquarters at the nearby Palais des Nations, amid what it calls a \u201cfinancial crisis\u201d.<\/p>\n
The International Labour Organisation recently exited two of the 11 floors at its Geneva base. Unicef, the UN agency for children\u2019s welfare, is transferring about 70% of its 400 staff from Geneva.<\/p>\n
Some Geneva-based agencies, such as UNAIDS, dedicated to tackling HIV\/Aids, are facing possible closure; many more are downsizing.<\/p>\n
These include the International Organisation for Migration, which has reduced its Geneva staff to about 600 from 1,000, shifting jobs to Thessaloniki in Greece, Nairobi, Bangkok and Panama as it cut its global headcount to 16,000 from 23,000.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think we need a huge footprint in Geneva to do the job well,\u201d said IOM director general Amy Pope.<\/p>\n
Cost pressures<\/p>\n
Switzerland has pledged 269-million Swiss francs (R5.63bn) to support multilateral institutions in the city, while a body established by the canton of Geneva and a foundation named after the founder of Rolex, Hans Wilsdorf, have jointly promised at least 50-million francs (R1.04bn).<\/p>\n
Geneva\u2019s mayor, Green Party politician Alfonso Gomez, said the cuts were putting the city\u2019s reputation as \u201cthe capital of multilateralism\u201d in jeopardy, though its overall economy was still faring well.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe remain deeply concerned. It\u2019s quite clear that … the abandonment of multilateralism is a cause for concern, not only for the city itself but for the world at large,\u201d he told Reuters.<\/p>\n
Though the UN Security Council and the General Assembly are based in New York, the global body\u2019s European headquarters, Geneva, has more UN workers than any other location.<\/p>\n
It is home to dozens of UN agencies, including the World Health Organisation, which US President Donald Trump pulled out of on his first day back in power.<\/p>\n
The cutbacks are the severest in the UN\u2019s 80-year history, and it is unclear if the Trump administration will pay the more than $2bn (R32.58bn) owed by the US in core budget fees.<\/p>\n
A US state department official told Reuters that Geneva was a sensible place for UN workers to meet member states, but not necessarily to do back-office functions.<\/p>\n
\u2018Unlearning lessons\u2019<\/p>\n
Other state donors have made cuts to spend more on defence, increasing the pain in Geneva, where UN offices cover an area the size of the Vatican City, centring on the Palais des Nations, a colossal complex originally built for the League of Nations.<\/p>\n
Many see belt-tightening as an overdue correction to a bloated bureaucracy.<\/p>\n
UN international staff, who do not pay Swiss tax, get an extra 89.4% on top of baseline salary due to high living costs, UN data show. Many also get spouse and education allowances.<\/p>\n
But diplomats and serving and former UN officials warn that hollowing out Geneva, where the International Committee of the Red Cross and the World Trade Organisation are also facing cuts, is dismantling the most tangible symbol of the international order built by the US to uphold peace after World War 2.<\/p>\n
Geneva is the illustration of a world that\u2019s not a zero-sum game, where people and nations see value in co-operating and one person\u2019s gain is not another\u2019s loss<\/p>\n
\u2014 \u00a0Jean-Marie Guehenno, ex-UN under-secretary-General<\/p>\n
\u201cGeneva is the illustration of a world that\u2019s not a zero-sum game, where people and nations see value in co-operating, and one person\u2019s gain is not another\u2019s loss,\u201d said Jean-Marie Guehenno, an ex-UN under-secretary-general for peacekeeping operations.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re unlearning the lessons we thought we\u2019d learnt from the terrible 20th century,\u201d he told Reuters.<\/p>\n
Geneva in February did host talks over the Ukraine war and the US stand-off with Iran, though American envoys squeezed both into a single day. Conflict with Iran broke out soon after.<\/p>\n
Switzerland\u2019s government, which owns the Palais Wilson, plans to renovate the building named for former US President Woodrow Wilson. Gomez said Geneva, to which the land belongs, had yet to decide what to do with it.<\/p>\n
Robert Curzon Price, CEO of real estate firm Barnes, who is helping multilateral bodies to manage the upheaval, said the impact on the roughly 10% of Geneva\u2019s commercial property market they occupy was unprecedented.<\/p>\n
But properties are not on the market yet because the authorities that own them are waiting to see if US policy becomes more multilateralist again, he said.<\/p>\n
In any case, Norway\u2019s foreign minister Espen Barth Eide said it makes little sense to base so many UN jobs in expensive cities such as Geneva and New York. Instead, the UN should streamline, prioritise and boost resources in the field, he said.<\/p>\n
Internal documents show the UN is moving to a slimmer but more fragmented model, with Kazakhstan, Qatar and Rwanda among the countries angling to host offices.<\/p>\n
Reuters<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When in 1937 the League of Nations vacated the 225-room Palais Wilson in Geneva, the global intergovernmental body…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":61549,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[65,3379,8437,1700,18739,3502,2746],"class_list":{"0":"post-61548","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-geneva","8":"tag-geneva","9":"tag-human-rights","10":"tag-league-of-nations","11":"tag-un","12":"tag-un-human-rights","13":"tag-unicef","14":"tag-united-nations"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ch\/116532845299120705","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61548"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61548\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}