Public diplomacy

Skip to content Leigh Turner Ambassador to Austria and UK Permanent Representative to the United Nations and other International Organisations in Vienna Part of UK in Austria 3rd July 2020 Vienna, Austria Online Q&A for UK nationals in Austria – Monday 6 July Do you have questions about how the UK’s exit from the EU affects you? The embassy is running an online Q&A session on Monday 6 July. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the team here and colleagues in London have continued to work closely with the Austrian authorities to ensure rights of British citizens living in Austria to continue to live and work here are protected, and any actions you need to take are communicated clearly and in good time. The Austrian government have not yet announced the exact details of the registration process you will need to follow, but the actions you can already take are on our living in Austria guide. Please sign up for email updates on that page. The Q&A will be on our embassy facebook page. On Monday 6..

Poznato je da se moć u politici lako oseti, ali teško definiše. Meka moć podjednako je kompleksna i teško uhvatljiva, ali je u globalizovanom...

Skip to content Matt Field British Ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina 19th June 2020 Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina Digital Transformation in the Public Sector in Bosnia and Herzegovina In the time of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, blockchain, virtual reality, big data, and many more are now transforming societies, economies, institutions and businesses across the globe. Governments worldwide are strategically leveraging new technologies to fundamentally improve policies, decision-making, public services and systems. Yet the full potential of digital government worldwide, including in Bosnia and Herzegovina, remains largely untapped. Global practice shows that to build a public sector fit for the future, governments must “reinvent” themselves. Digital transformation is not just about new technologies, but requires an overhaul of organizational structures, work processes, skills, culture and mindset. This applies not only to governme..

Skip to content Matt Field British Ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina 15th June 2020 Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina Cost of Youth Emigration Long lines of people in front of foreign embassies in Sarajevo has become an all too common backdrop on our way to work. Migration is a fact of modern life, with both posiitve and negative elements. But there is something especially worrying about seeing so many young people in these lines, often accompanied by family members, awaiting work permits. The Westminster Foundation for Democracy in Bosnia and Herzegovina, funded by the UK Government, has recently published the first study that examines how much does youth emigration cost this country, and the Western Balkan region. The findings of the study are alarming, and make a clear, fact-based case that the time to act is now. We do not believe that people of Bosnia and Herzegovina need to be told that the country is slowly but surely emptying. Accurate figures are often hard to find, but bet..

Skip to content Leigh Turner Ambassador to Austria and UK Permanent Representative to the United Nations and other International Organisations in Vienna Part of UK in Austria 15th June 2020 Vienna, Austria Making face masks and jobs in Grimsby “Two months ago this was just an empty warehouse”, the project manager says. We are entering a building adjacent to the Vienna HQ of Austrian company Hygiene Austria, south of Vienna. Inside, after donning face masks and spraying sanitiser on our hands, we find a hive of activity. Workers in sterile gowns operate high tech machines. They are making 12 million type-IIR, mouth-nose masks and FFP2 masks a month in Austria for medical and general use, including special masks for children in a range of appealing colours. As of 15 June they are also manufacturing 10 million face masks a month according to European and British standards in the United Kingdom, in the northern English coastal town of Grimsby. As the COVID-19 pandemic led to global shorta..

Skip to content Aidan Liddle UK Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the Conference on Disarmament Part of Conference on Disarmament 11th June 2020 Geneva, Switzerland Disarmament blog: Disarmament and the Pandemic I last blogged in late February on the P5 Conference in London, looking ahead to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference in April. The coronavirus outbreak in China was on our minds, of course, but none of us knew then how it would affect the rest of the world. Switzerland reported its first death from the disease on 5 March. The World Health Organisation (WHO) declared a pandemic on 11 March, and Switzerland imposed a lockdown a couple of days later. The human toll from the disease has been horrific. The economic, social and political implications will be immense, though it will take some time to understand them fully. My colleagues here dealing with the WHO, the humanitarian agencies, and the economic and human rights aspects of the crisis have been at ..

China's soft-power strategy is to project an image of Beijing as an economic alternative to the West and Russia. American political scientist Joseph Nye says...

Skip to content Mikael Allan Mikaelsson PhD, Science and Innovation Policy Advisor, Europe Head of Clean Growth & Climate Change 7th June 2020 Stockholm, Sweden The Transboundary Risks of Climate Change “The aggregation of national interest does not amount to the global interest of the planet” – Youssef Nassef, Director of Adaptation at the UNFCCC In line with the UK Government’s climate diplomacy pillar around “Climate Change Has No Borders” as part of its presidency to the United Nations 26th Conference of the Parties, the UK Foreign Office’s international science and innovation network joins forces with UK and European partners to bring transboundary climate risk to the spotlight. There is a strong interplay and synergy between the threats that humanity faces from the Covid-19 and climate change emergencies, and the commonalities between the two are great, as are parallels to be drawn. Covid-19 and climate change threats are both environmental in origin and are global health crise..

Skip to content Caron Röhsler British High Commissioner to Maldives Part of UK in Maldives 7th June 2020 Maldives Innovation for a Sustainable Ocean: Maldives & the Nekton Mission Were it not for covid, for World Oceans Day this year I’d have been writing about early reports from the Nekton Mission’s First Descent in Maldives, following their exploration of sites around Addu Atoll, the Zero Degree Channel and Gnaviyani Atoll. This ambitious expedition to “the Midnight Zone” of the Indian Ocean (the least explored ocean in the world) should have completed its field research by now. The team would have been chomping through terabytes of data at their Oxford base, just as they did after their expedition to Seychelles which I also had the thrill of witnessing, in 2019. The theme of this year’s World Oceans Day is “Innovation for a Sustainable Ocean”. What distinguishes Nekton from other deep sea expeditions is a commitment to innovation in both scientific method and sustainable developmen..

New digital diplomacy efforts are bearing considerable fruit on social media, three officials from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Digital Diplomacy Department said...