What's In Blue

Latest post: Fri 7 Aug 2026

Insights on the work of the UN Security Council

Arria-formula Meeting on Implementing International Humanitarian Law in Ukraine

On Monday morning (10 August), there will be an Arria-formula meeting titled “Implementing international humanitarian law: prisoners of war, civilian detainees and foreign fighters, in the context of Russia’s war against Ukraine”. Latvia and the UK are organising the meeting, with co-sponsorship from Ukraine.

The anticipated briefers include Claudia Fuentes Julio, Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights and Head of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in New York; Leniie Umerova, a Crimean Tatar activist and human rights defender who was detained in December 2022 while travelling to Crimea, eventually transferred to Moscow and held on espionage charges before her release in September 2024; Khuan Alberto Leyva Garsiya, a junior sergeant in the Ukrainian Armed Forces, who defended the city of Mariupol and the Azovstal steel plant in 2022 and spent more than three years in Russian captivity before his release in August 2025; Oleg Gushchyn, a Ukrainian lawyer and legal expert with the Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, a Ukrainian governmental body that coordinates state activities related to compliance with the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions; and Sheida Kiran, a British-Turkish-Iranian documentary filmmaker who recently produced the film “Into the Void: Putin’s Foreign Fighters”, an investigation into the recruitment of foreign nationals to fight in the war.

Continue reading