Page 373 - 100 Reflections that Crafted Geneva International_V-Petrovsky_private special edition

Bringing the Concept to Life

Every year UNOG services about 7,500 international conferences and
meetings - almost double the number held in New York at UN Headquarters.
They range from technical sessions to assemblies and negotiations on major
political, economic and social issues. Some 80,000 people from all over the
world attend these meetings. The Palais des Nations will host the annual
session of ECOSOC this year and the Social Summit in the year 2000. At the
suggestion of the Swiss Government, the conference on the illicit traffic of
weapons will also be held in Geneva. In addition, some significant political
negotiations like those on the settlement of the conflict situation in Abkhazia
(Georgia) have started and are regularly held in Geneva.

Technological innovations have added a new flavor to UNOG activities
including in conference services - the geographic scope of which is no longer
limited to Geneva-based meetings. Remote translation and text-processing for
conferences held outside Geneva now provide the opportunity for meetings
held in other cities to be serviced, at a distance, from Geneva.

In the field of operational activities, further consolidation is taking place in
five major areas: the promotion of human rights and humanitarian assistance;
trade and development; science and technology; disarmament negotiation;
research and training. New offices of the organizations of the UN system have
been recently established in Geneva, for example the UN Office for Project
Services which executes a wide range of projects in the humanitarian,
development and peace-keeping areas.

If in the Cold War Geneva was well known for its spirit, the power of the
present-day Geneva is its knowledge, which is the basis of wisdom in politics
and diplomacy.

Since the founding of the League of Nations, the organizations of the UN
system in Geneva have accumulated huge amounts of data and analytical
material. They are currently transforming their activities from that of the
collection of information to its wide dissemination - in particular by electronic
means. For example, WIPO is developing a new system named WIPONet that
contains over 1 million pages of documents on intellectual property issues.
UNOG maintains the biggest database in the UN, the Optical Disk System that
contains about 170 Gigabytes of data representing more than 3.5 million pages.

International norms of behavior, of which Geneva is a major repository,
make it possible for UN Member States to make their national decisions on the

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