Parliamentarians champion humanitarian action in the birthplace of the Geneva Conventions
The Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) has concluded its 151st IPU Assembly, with nearly 1,150 delegates, including over 600 members of parliament, from 132 countries in attendance. Notably, women MPs comprised nearly 37% of the parliamentarians at the Assembly.
Meeting under the theme of parliamentary support for humanitarian action, the five-day Assembly took place in Geneva, the birthplace of the 1949 Geneva Conventions – the international framework that ensures legal protections for people during armed conflict.
Global legislators from around the world adopted the Geneva Declaration on Upholding humanitarian norms and supporting humanitarian action in times of crisis.
The Declaration comes against a backdrop of more than 130 ongoing conflicts around the world, leaving over 310 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
The Declaration underlines that the Geneva Conventions, the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention and other instruments of international humanitarian law (IHL), have saved millions of lives and limited the impact of armed conflicts on citizens when enforced and respected.
Parliamentarians are called upon to reinforce and champion humanitarian action by working to ratify IHL treaties, integrate them into national legislation, allocate financial resources to aid agencies, facilitate training of armed forces and foster partnerships across the global humanitarian ecosystem – including the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and relevant UN agencies. Most importantly, parliamentarians are called upon to keep humanitarian considerations at the heart of the decisions they take, especially those related to security.
Other resolutions and outcomes
The Assembly also passed a resolution on Recognizing and supporting the victims of illegal international adoption and taking measures to prevent this practice.
The resolution strongly condemns illegal intercountry adoptions as violations of children’s rights and urges all States and parliaments to classify such acts as forms of human trafficking.
The IPU Assembly further passed an emergency item resolution on Parliamentary action against transnational organized crime, cybercrime and hybrid threats to democracy and human security – which aims to bolster the global parliamentary response to growing threats that challenge international peace, democratic governance and the rule of law.
Parliamentary diplomacy intensifies
Throughout the Assembly, IPU bodies dedicated to peace and security convened – including the Task Force for peaceful resolution of the war in Ukraine and the Committee on Middle East Questions – to seek new avenues to foster peace through parliamentary dialogue.
Additional meetings focused on building bridges between countries currently experiencing tensions, such as Armenia and Azerbaijan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda.
Quotes:
Director-General of the ICRC, Pierre Krähenbühl, opening the Assembly, said: “Dehumanization strips people of dignity in words, policy and practice, and acts as an enabler: by eroding empathy and normalizing suffering, it lowers political and legal barriers to permissive policies, weakens demands for accountability, and makes legal backsliding more politically tolerable. Norms like IHL are bulwarks against that slide, but they can be reimagined, weakened or ignored if dehumanizing narratives become mainstream. That is where parliaments must act.”
IPU Vice-President and President of the 151st IPU Assembly, Gabriela Morawska-Stanecka, said: “Humanitarian norms act as a shield for those who bear no arms: but their reach goes further. These norms also place restrictions on the means and methods of warfare. Over time, humanity has come to recognize that there are limits and that certain weapons and tactics are just too inhumane to be tolerated and should be consigned to history, never to be repeated.”
Secretary General of the IPU, Martin Chungong, said: “Parliamentarians must advocate and legislate for humanitarian action, providing aid to those most affected by armed conflict: saving lives, alleviating suffering and restoring human dignity. In short, humanitarian action appeals to our common humanity: it provides us with a route to overcome division, violence and mistrust, and to help those caught in the crossfire to survive and continue their lives in safety and dignity.”
The IPU Assembly goes east
The 152nd Assembly will take place from 15 to 19 April 2026 in Istanbul, hosted by the Grand National Assembly of Türkiye.
Geneva declaration presented by MPs Helen Pushie Manyeneng (Botswana) and Laurent Wehrli (Switzerland) © IPU / Lucien Fortunati
