This is Inside Geneva.

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

In today's programme.

The top story of 2025 has been cuts in the humanitarian aid sector.

We knew with Donald Trump coming back to the White House, most likely there would be important cuts, but we just didn't expect, I think, the scale of the cuts that happened and also just how brutal they were.

I wanted to speak about Gaza, which has been one of the main things that I've been writing about for the past two years.

It has been, in the words of so many humanitarians, the most horrific humanitarian crisis they've seen in their careers.

My story of 2025 climate change, because I got called out in May to cover the village of Blatten, which had been completely wiped off the map by a combination of a weak glacier and a weak mountainside.

We ought to bring in Ukraine.

We did have Ukrainian peace talks here in Geneva quite recently.

All the talk of peace had to some extent eclipsed the humanitarian toll of this conflict.

The large numbers of Ukrainians that had been hunted down by these short-range drones.

I want to talk about the subject of migration because that's one unifying factor I think I know is going to be on the agenda in 2026.

Hello and welcome to Inside Geneva.

And as we always do at this time of year, I've got my colleagues round the table to talk about things that really resonated with us, maybe really moved us in 2025 that we also think probably have relevance for 2026.

We hope it's not going to be too depressing a program.

And to join me, I've got here Dorianne Borkhalter from SwissInfo, the company that produces Inside Geneva, of course.

I have Emma Farge of Reuters and Nick Cumming Bruce, contributor to New York Times.

Just one thing before we actually get going.

Our colleagues at Foreign Policy have a new podcast series.

Here's a short burst of what that's all about.

Hello, I'm Femi O'Kay, and I'm the new host of The Negotiators, the show that draws back the curtain and some of the most compelling negotiations around the world.

This season, we're taking a scuba diving in the Red Sea, walking the grounds of a luxury resort in Uganda, and even aboard an aging oil tanker floating off the coast of Yemen.

We were constantly monitored by drones overhead, divers under the vessel, so it was not exactly a high trust operation.

That's the negotiators available now, wherever you get your podcasts.

Our colleagues at Foreign Policy there with the series The Negotiators, which I'm sure listeners to Inside Geneva will enjoy as well.

Okay, Dorian, we said we were going to talk about stories that resonated with us.

What's yours?

So for me, I think the top story of 2025 has been uh cuts in the humanitarian aid sector.

Late today, the US State Department suspended all foreign assistance around the world for at least three months.

Donald Trump suspended American foreign aid on day one of his presidency.

The United Nations aid agency is saying that there could be 2,000 new cases of HIV due to the USAID cuts.

We knew with Donald Trump coming back to the White House, most likely there would be important cuts because the US was funding about 40% of the humanitarian sector.

But we just didn't expect, I think, the uh scale of the cuts that happened and also just how brutal they were.

And uh now we're at the end of the year, and it turns out basically two-thirds of uh what the US used to give to the uh UN has disappeared.

And it's also I think important to uh point out that it's not just the US, it's also uh European countries.

Great Britain cut in house.

The UK, uh Germany, Norway, France, a lot of the traditional donors that basically have also cut their uh spending for humanitarian aid.

And of course, throughout the year we've heard about the impact this has on the ground, which at the end of the day is the terrible thing about those cuts.

And uh just recently we heard about Afghanistan as winter approaches.

They were saying they're only able to reach about one million people at the same time.

Up to six million to who are I mean facing severe hunger, phase four, I think, IPC they were saying.

Yeah, exactly.

And you know, they were talking about the choices they have to make, and it's not really they're not prioritizing between people that are severely hungry versus a little less, but it's really among people severely hungry.

I mean, you're just getting to the ones you can reach.

Did we, though, expect the severity?

I mean, I know round about spring I was talking to the UN Population Fund and UN women, and they gave me graphic accounts of what they were having to cut in Afghanistan, mother and baby clinics.

And I think that was when it started to dawn on me this is going to be much, much worse than actually we had even anticipated when we saw Elon Musk taking his chainsaw to USAID.

What about you, Emma?

It it's certainly been been awful, but the people that I've been speaking to in the sector still see the worst yet to come.

The signs are that childhood mortality will be up again for the first time this century.

That was a Gates Foundation uh prediction, 200,000 more deaths uh this year.

So uh we're starting to see the worst, and I think that we'll have more to report on that in the year to come, for sure.

There'll be more fallout, and I think there will be beyond the suffering, which is obviously a story that we we need to tell, it's also going to be a broader fallout that could have consequences for migration, for security.

World Food Program was talking about how they couldn't get enough food aid for people in Nigeria, but yet armed groups were coming along and filling the gap and recruiting some of the people.

So I think there will be some interesting kind of shifts.

There could be even security, they could be security implications going forward of some of those cuts.

So I think it's just the beginning.

Neek, what about you?

I fear that, I must say.

Absolutely.

And I think one of the at a time when there's a lot of pressure on the UN to be more efficient and streamlined.

I mean, the hard fact is that budgets are still tanking, and they have no means of predicting what resources they're going to have to deal with, which kind of really cripples their abilities to plan and deliver, you know, in the most uh efficient way.

So, yeah, the outlook is extremely bleak.

And the kind of frustrating thing is like we do see, we've been seeing this for several years, that the rich section of the planet is getting richer, a very small fraction of people.

And the middling, which I suppose we might count ourselves as, while we still have jobs, we're being persuaded to think that the poorest are somehow our enemy.

And this is translating into the kind of funding cuts that governments are getting away with because they are playing this us first, us first, me first card.

Aaron Powell Yeah, it was interesting to hear uh Philippo Grandi yesterday, in almost his last public appearance, the UN refugee chief, saying that the cuts were not politically innocent.

He said they were designed and intended to weaken us, and the world's humanitarian system is going to pay a price for it.

Yeah, but w humanity is going to pay a price for that.

If I if I put my loyal to the humanitarian system hat on, the poorest people on the planet, mostly women and children, are going to pay a price for that.

If I could add something, because you know, just to understand the scale perhaps of the cuts themselves, I think it's it might be important to just talk about the figures as well.

So basically in 2025, the UN has raised so far about$13 billion.

And so that's the lowest level since 2016, when it was also about$12 billion.

Only the difference is that in 2016,$12 billion would cover, you know, about half or more of what the UN was hoping to raise.

Today it's only a quarter.

So I think yeah, needs have always increased, basically.

And so yeah, I think that really puts it in in perspective.

Aaron Powell What's interesting though, hearing from donors is that this uh so-called hyper prioritization process, as Tom Fletcher, the UN aid chief, calls it, they don't think it's gone far enough yet.

Um, the ones I'm speaking to.

They're still talking about UN budgets as fictional.

One of them used that term.

And it's true if you look at the amount of funding that's going towards them, it's sometimes 10%, sometimes a quarter funded.

So the question is whether they're going to have to scale back their ambitions further in in the years ahead.

Well, they always know that their budgets will not be fully funded.

It's a rare, you know, lesser spotted aardvark of a UN budget that gets 100% funding.

I think I've seen it once in my 20 years reporting, and I think that was after the Asian tsunami.

So they know But I guess it's the question of institutional reform as well, right?

Because uh back in May there was this memo leaked which Reuters reported on, and there were some really bold ideas about consolidating some of these UN agencies where donors saw overlap and so on.

So far we haven't seen that yet.

So the question is will donors keep giving funding to a system that they still see as a little bit flabby with too many people doing the same thing?

Maybe I'm being devil's advocate here, but speaking to donors, they do see the UN as trying to still do too much and not being efficient enough about the way that it spends money.

Yeah, I mean I can I can see that.

Except I've seen it evolve over the last uh twenty years.

It seems to me more rigorous in get not duplicating than it was twenty years ago.

They've got their special emergency fund, which generally works quite efficiently.

And I also I hate to say this, but I don't have a lot of faith in governments who are elected politicians on short-term terms, being able to work out what works in long-term humanitarian aid, particularly when these are the very same people who've completely failed to broker peace.

That's what we need them for, but they're not doing it.

Emma, can we come on to your topic?

Yes.

Um, I wanted to speak about Gaza, which uh has been one of the main things that I've been writing about for the past two years, really.

I feel like I'm an auxiliary correspondent of the Middle East team.

Hunger and fear.

Palestinians in Gaza say going to new food distribution sites comes with the risk of death.

Reports from Gaza said at least 26 Palestinians have been killed, and many more wounded after Israeli tank fire hit people near a US-funded aid distribution center.

Israeli forces have opened fire again on hungry Palestinians desperate for aid.

It has been, in the words of so many humanitarians, the most horrific humanitarian crisis they've seen in their careers.

So I've devoted a lot of time to reporting on that this year, as has the UN press corps.

But two standout stories this year: the mass casualty events that we saw in Gaza when people were just trying to get food, hundreds killed on a daily basis, trying to access these food sites that many UN officials said were based on a betrayal of humanitarian principles.

That was one story that stood out, and another was the finding of famine in Gaza.

I believe the first time that such a finding was declared outside of Africa.

From what we're hearing, the situation is still awful.

The dramatic headlines and the dramatic violence has dissipated since the October 10th ceasefire, of course.

But the conditions in which people are living in are obviously awful.

Thousands still being treated for malnutrition, 60 million tons of rubble.

And no bulldozers of the colours.

No, yes, it's not allowed in.

So even just getting by on a daily basis, very difficult.

So the infrastructure broken, sewage running through the streets during the rainy periods.

But then this big question of reconstruction, it's just not even being tackled yet because of the restrictions on getting equipment in.

We did uh investigation on the unexploded bombs of Gaza and Humanity Inclusion, one of the organizations working on that, said it's gonna take 30 years just to clear the surface.

There are these uh Mark 84 2,000-pound bombs that are just in the sand underneath people's homes, and that requires a lot of technical equipment that's gonna be very sensitive to get into the enclave.

So, this whole question of what happens after this initial phase of the ceasefire, after the final hostage's body is returned, hasn't even really been broached yet.

So we'll definitely be uh writing about that in 2026, um the next phases of uh the Gaza crisis.

Do we think that uh the people who uh got involved to broker this ceasefire uh even understand the enormity?

I mean, I'm thinking of people like you know, Trump's team, Steve Whitcoff, Jared Kushner, because they're not talking to the United Nations, who at least has some peace-building conflict resolution, sustainable peace experience behind it.

Well, I think it's just very difficult to identify quite what their agenda really is.

And here we are, what three months after the October 10 ceasefire sort of took effect.

We still don't know very much about the Board of Peace that is supposed to be leading us into the brave new future.

We know nothing about the international security force that is supposed to provide uh a basis for security in the Strip.

We have no idea what Israel's intentions really are in relation to withdrawal from the yellow zone that it controls, which is what half the territory.

And instead, we see Israel introducing a new system of INGO registration, which the NGOs are warning will uh emaciate an already struggling system of humanitarian delivery.

Although the the amount of food and other supplies going into the Gaza Strip has obviously increased significantly since October 10.

Most of it is coming from uh commercial suppliers.

So this can't be afforded by people who have spent two years under heavy bombardment and have no money and no resources.

I know, and the aid agencies are telling us every week here in Geneva that the stuff they would like to get in is getting in incredibly slowly.

And what we see is the Palestinians in Gaza, the bombs aren't falling as often.

But I mean, it's freezing cold.

I was I mean, I saw these pictures of these tents of the howling wind.

I mean, how are you supposed to live like that?

And I think you well, you know, one story that's been slightly eclipsed by the enormity of the other uh abuses that have been going on is is the Medivac story.

Where um they they'd been playing fast and loose with the lives of of people who needed medical treatment and uh just extraordinary obstruction put in the way of getting children with absolutely uh appalling, life-threatening injuries, um, getting approvals that allowed them to go out for medical treatment overseas.

And we're not really very much better now in terms of the numbers going out for medical evacuations than we were, you know, in in a a year ago.

So it's it's really a shocking story, and and numerous lives, numerous children have died waiting for approvals that could have been given instantly.

And that is definitely a story that's not going away.

Shall we move to the third, which will be mine?

Um my story of 2025 was primarily Switzerland-based, because I cover the country as well, but it relates to International Geneva because it's climate change.

A dramatic demonstration of nature's power and a potential warning of the consequences of climate change.

A picturesque Swiss town was buried after part of a glacier broke off and came sliding down a mountain in the Alps.

In the past half hour, leaders at the COP 30 Climate Summit in Brazil have agreed on a deal that ends the summit but fails to mention fossil fuels.

Climate change.

Because if it goes higher or lower, whatever the hell happens, this climate change, it's the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion.

Because I got called out in May to cover the village of Blatten, which had been completely eradicated, just wiped off the map by a combination of a weak glacier and a weak mountainside descending.

Now, this being Switzerland and being an organized and wealthy country, luckily the 300 inhabitants had been evacuated, but they're still evacuated.

That village, if it's ever rebuilt, will never be what it was.

And those houses had stood there for 800 years, which means that the kind of alpine mentality of we build our villages where we know it's fairly safe, which you see all over the Alps, doesn't pertain anymore because things are getting more unstable, because the glaciers are getting thinner, and they the ice holds the mountains together, the permafrost is thawing.

And at the same time, climate change, well, where was it in 2025?

We had COP 30, the United States didn't go.

We have the president, the most powerful man on earth, we are told, President Trump, telling the assembled UN leaders in New York that it was all a massive con job.

I have to say, this worries me because Switzerland is a wealthy country, but to go to that village and see people just sitting there shocked, waiting for the insurance man, but not knowing where they were going to live for for years on end.

And that is happening to small island states, it's happening to parts of Africa where we see increasing drought, crops failing.

And I don't know what you guys think, but it feels like we don't have the bandwidth to even address it anymore.

With Switzerland, I mean uh Switzerland is, I think, one of the hardest affected countries in the world by climate change.

Um but I think it's also interesting, you know, if we think about Donald Trump's message w about the environment and climate change, even in in Switzerland.

And you know, there's a huge savings that's been approved by the government, that's now in front of the parliament, and a lot of the environmental organizations are actually saying that some of those cuts will be problematic for the environment.

Uh, for example, I think part of it was about renovating uh buildings so that they're more energy efficient.

There's cuts also in education and research.

I feel like those aren't really the kind of areas in which you want to cut if you're thinking about addressing climate change in the future.

Do we think the UN has a role to play here?

I mean, Guterres, we come back to this.

He started his life as UN Secretary General saying climate change was going to be his key focus.

Yeah, I feel sorry for him because that was really his mandate, and it just feels like it slipped away from him as political priorities have changed.

And going into the last year of his mandate, it's gonna be hard to drive that point home, I think, that it that it is a top priority with so many other crises around the world.

I mean, we're definitely going to be discussing climate change in 2026, even if the politicians don't do anything about it.

Events, natural disasters are gonna remind us.

I think there's there's no getting away from that.

Yeah, and look at the outcome of the plastics treaty negotiations in Geneva, which again was you would have thought was something that we could have seen some progress on, but it didn't materialize.

And then you look at the powerful lobby of the fossil fuel industries in COP meetings.

Um they came to the plastics treaty as well.

Uh indeed, but uh, I mean it just reminds you you know where the power really lies at this point in this debate.

It is extraordinary.

Nick, do you want to come with your story of 2025?

Well, I suppose we ought to bring in Ukraine.

The Kyiv skyline on the fourth round of Russia's now weekly concerted targeting of the water in people's taps, the heating in their holes.

An unmanned Russian bomber drone punching a vast hole in the side of the building.

Three people lost their lives, more than ten were wounded, including two children.

We did have Ukrainian peace talks here in Geneva quite recently.

And in a recent address to uh the Human Rights Council, Volkoturk, did bring up how all the talk of peace had to some extent eclipsed the humanitarian toll of this conflict.

The large numbers of Ukrainians that had been hunted down by sh, you know, these short-range drones, um, which were Apparently the Russian soldiers call it going on safari.

This is yeah.

That you can they put they post it on YouTube.

Well, he said that there had been more than 300 people, you know, individuals sort of killed, riding in buses, riding on cars, walking around and who are kind of chased and hunted by these devices.

And he talked also quite grimly about um the astonishing reports of torture and abuse of Ukrainian detainees, both civilian and military.

I think he said that they'd interviewed 187 who had been returned, and 185 had documented in detail extreme forms of torture and abuse, including sexual torture.

It gives you a pretty grim assessment on the state of a conflict that all the talk of peace that was going to come within 24 hours of President Trump's uh election remains really elusive.

And the peace deal, we don't know quite what's in the latest iteration, but the original had a complete amnesty for war crimes.

Yeah, and we haven't seen anything that really bridges um the positions of the European states, not just Ukraine, but Europe generally, and and the position of the United States.

And and then, of course, President Putin, who uh remains um completely obdurate and holding to positions that are completely a non-starter as a as a as a basis for negotiation.

Maybe this is a point where we should actually bang the drum for the United Nations a bit, because the work that the human rights investigators are doing, whether it's Ukraine, whether it's Sudan, whether it's Gaza, this is really important.

Or Syria, for example.

That, you know, if you've had to suffer this kind of violation, at least the UN is providing somebody who will document it and validate, yes, this happened to you, and maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next year, but at some point we hope there will be some accountability.

I mean, that's something I think we could say, yeah, we still need the UN in Geneva for.

But that's tough because um people, when they think about the UN, they mostly think about its roles in promoting peace in the world.

And so this mission obviously hasn't worked very well, or even if it's if it comes to mediation, I think the Secretary General has a little bit of wiggle room when it comes to offering his uh his services as a mediator.

But I mean, of course, the parties have to accept it, which we can all imagine hasn't really happened.

Um, but yeah, I think really in the public's image, the fact that there is such a war that most likely Ukraine will have to give away part of its territory, so it really hurts what the UN stands for, and and I guess uh yeah, international law more broadly.

But uh I mean, you know, the UN is only as good as its member states.

And if the member states are starving United Nations humanitarian and international NGO humanitarian agencies of funds, the best way to reduce the load that's left by conflicts is to make peace.

And that comes back to the Security Council and the states that live and serve on it, and we have seen almost total paralysis on the part of the United Nations Security Council.

I think at the end of the day, if you have superpowers and and you know three of them, they've got their vetoes on the Security Council.

At the end of the day, if they don't want to play ball, the UN is basically paralyzed.

Apart from its humanitarian wing.

But even now, they are suffering this kind of politicization because their funding is being cut.

But if you look at Ukraine, for example, the United States has not at any point consulted the United Nations, not once, about how you might.

I mean, we can criticize uh the the UN Secretariat and so on, all we like, but there are people there who have some experience of peace building and on bringing people who are completely violently opposed into the room and encouraging them to make some concessions and look each other in the eye.

I'm sorry, but business real estate guys from Manhattan don't have this kind of experience.

I mean, uh what what do we think?

How does the UN kind of punch a bit higher if somebody like Trump or Putin's just going to ignore the United Nations?

When was the last time, though, that it was an earnest attempt to broker an end to a conflict at all?

Syria?

Yes, possibly.

Was it a serious attempt?

There was an attempt which brought in states as peacemakers, states that were actually arming the combatants.

So is that a serious attempt?

We haven't seen the same leadership, though, as we have had in previous uh generations.

And even the role of the UN aid chief, it there is some scope for sort of backdoor diplomacy.

Maybe we're just not privy to what's going on, but haven't seen those those efforts.

And the US criticism of the UN is back to basics, broker ends to conflicts.

We haven't seen as much of that as we've seen in the past.

Maybe the Black Sea deal, you could say, was good old-fashioned diplomacy.

There was at least an agreement there at one point, but we're just not saying the same as I mean we shouldn't necessarily underestimate that that was not an easy deal to get.

You know, it sounds, oh God, but for goodness sake, of course these ships can sail back and forth and deliver grain.

But actually, this is the hard graft that eventual peace or ceasefires are built on, not a load of handshakes in the Oval Office or the Kremlin with the cameras clicking.

Well, we might segue from there into President Trump.

I know you wanted to talk about him.

Um I want to talk about him too on the subject of migration, because that's one unifying factor I think I know is going to be on the agenda in 2026.

But first, um President Trump.

Well, just that here we are 11 and a half months into his first term.

And everything that we have talked about in some way, shape, or form, has been powerfully traced back to him.

Powerfully influenced by what has or hasn't come out of Washington, D.C.

And we have seen, you know, love him or loathe him.

I mean, this is probably the most consequential presidency of this century in terms of what he has done to governance within the United States.

He's issued more executive orders in the first 11 months than he did in the whole of his first term.

He's absolutely turned the relationship between the White House and Congress on its on its head, uh, expanded executive power.

And then in terms of foreign policy, we see President Trump, you know, asserting himself as a great peacemaker.

But um at the same time, when you look at the negotiations around Ukraine and the national security policy that has just come out of the White House, we have seen essentially the Transatlantic Alliance being severely strained, if not impossibly fractured.

And that is that has been the most significant international alliance underpinning international security since World War II.

Well, it's also kind of the impetus behind the creation of the United Nations, the Transatlantic Alliance.

So there we are.

But um, what's going to happen in 2026?

And we're seeing him losing some of his grip on the levers of power that uh have sustained him so well in 2025.

I mean, we're seeing the MAGA base showing distinct fractures.

We're seeing his poll ratings in relation to economic management slipping quite significantly.

We've seen the elections of uh, for example, uh a mayor in New York and two governors that um uh were elected uh Democratic candidates, elected on huge margins, which I think is significantly worrying Republicans.

And we're seeing some fissures in between Republican senators and congressmen and the White House in terms of foreign policy.

So, yeah, uh a lot of questions about what he will be left with come the midterms in November 2026.

Which could affect, I guess, what happens to us and the institutions here.

I did read people are talking about it, this interview with the White House Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles, in Vanity Fair.

She's quoted as saying she was aghast at what Trump and Elon Musk were doing to US foreign aid.

Did you do anything about her feeling of being aghast?

I don't think so.

But I don't know.

I suspect he's still going to be living rent-free in our brains this time next year.

Can we turn to our final topic, which I thought we could all talk about because it's definitely on the agenda this year and it will be on the agenda next year, and that is migration.

All illegal entry will immediately be halted, and we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.

The look may be festive, but the message is not on a Sunday morning in Crobarum in the southeast of England.

But it's incredibly important to me that we stop the boats, to smash the gangs, and smash the gangs, smashing the gangs that are running this absolute vital trade.

United States immigration and customs enforcement ice is now equivalent to some of the largest military forces in the world.

This virtual army is supposed to be targeting criminal illegal immigrants in the United States.

But more and more US citizens and legal immigrants are being rounded up.

I talked to, and Insight Geneva listeners, you can hear that.

And he was dismayed.

He said it's a complete race to the bottom with the politics of migration, whether in Europe or in America.

And he said we're he basically said Europe is throwing away its civilization, the way it is is uh addressing this topic.

And this is one here.

We're getting a new UN refugee chief, I think will be announced this week.

What do we think?

Because it's it the goalposts have moved so far just in a few years.

It's like migration is almost like it's like this dirty word.

It's interesting though, because there was this race uh to replace Filippo Grandi as refugee chief, but everyone still was defending the 1951 convention.

There have been attempts to shift the definition of asylum by uh the states, and in the UNGA earlier this year, you you saw the Trump administration trying to narrow the definition of asylum.

But so far, at least on a multilateral level in Geneva, everyone is standing by it.

But yes, of course, every state is is uh looking after their own interests, and one of the problems is that that sets a very bad example for the states who are actually doing the most to host to refugees and migrants around the world, which are African countries like Chad or um Uganda or maybe Bangladesh in Turkey for a while.

Turkey.

Yes.

And um I interviewed the head of the uh Danish Refugee Council, Charlotte Slendt, the other day, and she said she's very worried in 2026 about some of those countries saying, Well, why should we open our doors?

You're not funding this anymore.

We're much poorer than you.

So why should we let them in?

I mean, and that's as a recipe for instability and more refugee flows, which is what Europe says, oh, it doesn't want.

And America, of course, says it doesn't want.

Dorian?

No, Sophia, yeah, I fear that this narrative that uh immigration is ruining Europe, uh, that Donald Trump's pushing, obviously will inspire European right-wing populist leaders.

And I think next year we'll hear a lot more about this, and then obviously as well with the what Donald Trump is doing in the US, as you said.

I mean, he's lowering the bar really low for what is acceptable and is going against uh international uh norms, you know, non-refoolment or uh ripping people off the streets.

Yeah.

Enforced disappearance, actually.

Yeah, exactly.

And so it just also weakening international norms and uh the funding for all the um organizations here that are dealing with this, whether it's the uh High Commissioner for Refugees or the IOM or the uh Human Rights Office, all those have been some of the worst affected organizations, so it's not a good sign, I guess.

Nick?

Well, it's even in the UK you see a center-left government under massive pressure to address the issues of immigration and fearing that it's it's going to, you know, if an election were held tomorrow that um its massive majority would swing into the hands of of a hard-right politician who would completely change the rules and would call for UK withdrawn from the European Court of Human Rights.

I mean, that's just kind of an indicator.

And we see right-wing governments across Europe um pushing this and and enormous pressures that are not being properly resisted by governments that I think uh have a mandate to to pursue a sort of more liberal policy.

I wonder how the the UN, if it can at all, counter this, because it is this kind of snake oil salesman thing.

You are feeling bad, you can't get a doctor's appointment, you can't get a house, it's that person's fault over there who doesn't look like you, who doesn't speak the same language as you.

A rational person actually knows this is nonsense.

We know it's because our governments don't invest or they're investing in in the wrong things, or they haven't planned for the for the long term.

And yet it works.

And I I remember in it must have been 2016, 2017, everybody talks now about what a disaster it was for Angela Merkel to say Wirtschaffen das.

Do you remember that?

And they let in the Syrian refugees.

But sometime around 2017-2018, the the UN Refugee Agency they did a series of little films about Syrians living in Germany, completely integrated.

I mean, okay, it was a it was a good news story, but do we need more of that?

I mean, they they interviewed a bus driver and a nurse and people who are doing jobs that Germany needs.

It will be interesting to see what um Barem Saleh, the new High Commissioner, from Iraq.

From Iraq.

Exactly.

Not the first uh refugee, apparently, to head the agency, the second after Van Hoeven, in um who escaped from the Netherlands in the Second World War.

But it will be exciting to hear, I think, directly from a former refugee, a success story, someone who found an exit plan and became the head of a country.

What better example of a positive contribution to society?

Well, it was interesting too.

I mean, in the answers that he gave to the questionnaire, which went to all the candidates that they identified as candidates, um, his answers stressed the importance of UNHCR's protection mandate.

And the other particular theme that I I f saw I thought was quite heavily stressed in his answers was the principle of inclusion, the importance of including refugee and asylum seeker and stateless people's voices in shaping refugee policy.

So uh that was a point that um Philippo Grandi, the outgoing chief, made in his final remarks.

It's it's going to be one of the challenges, and we all wish him well in seeing how he's able to deliver on it.

Well, we do wish him well, but I do think one thing, if you if you could have refugees more involved with the policy, but also more into schools, tell people about the experiences.

You know, not unfortunately, even though we accept, but not very many, we accept refugees in Europe.

How often do we actually sit down and talk to them, to asylum seekers?

But on that note, we ended on migration in part because we're just at the start of 2026.

Now we are going to have a special on migration in February.

We can have a look at how the first few weeks of the new High Commissioner for Refugees.

We are going to be looking at disinformation at some point this year, and we're going to be looking at what is the point of foreign.

Aid with yaysayers and naysayers.

So tune in for all of that for now.

That's it.

Thank you, Dorian, Emma, and Nick.

And all the very best for what we hope will be a brighter and more positive 2026.

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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.