Uncover the remarkable journey of Edith Ballantyne, a 102-year-old pioneer in UN revitalization. From teenage refugee to influential diplomat, her insights on global governance and peace are timeless and inspiring.
Once a teenage refugee knowing barely any English and assigned to labouring jobs, Edith Ballantyne, born on 10 December 1922, became a ‘giant’ to her colleagues in the Geneva-based international organization that taught her the language. From 1968 she was a leading campaigner for a better United Nations with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), joining almost by chance after raising four children with her husband in the Swiss city. Coordinator of WILPF’s work with the UN from 1972, she has maintained her reputation for plain-speaking while accepting of the views of others. On her 102nd birthday (yes, Human Rights Day), Peter Hulm, remembering her promotion of fairer human rights in the 1970s and beyond, looks back over her career and her hopes for the United Nations.
“The UN as an organization, or an international instrument of that kind, is absolutely essential.” That was in 2015 at the age of 92, and she still has that conviction. “I think the UN Charter, in spite of some weak points, is still a very very important document and if it were really taken [seriously] and developed, it’s a mechanism that makes peace possible,” she told Felicity Ruby of the Green Agenda (LINK) and told me a few days ago she still thinks so.
For Edith, the essence of the U.N. Charter is that “though we have our national and regional interests, we have to work for the common interest which means we have to sit down, talk, find solutions in which some compromises have to be made but in which everyone in the long run gains because peace can be maintained.”
But she regrets: “That has disappeared again — the whole notion of collective security and common interests. Now, quite openly, governments say, ‘this is not in our national interest’. Well, that is absolutely denying the very essence of the UN Charter! When we talk about peace, we also need to look at the whole political structure that is denying us moving towards peace.”
As Edith pointed out: “The Security Council is the important body on maintaining peace and it is not doing very well.” She criticized proposals to have more permanent members elected but deny them veto powers. “To me, that’s just going around the wrong way.”
WILPF, before the new millennium, campaigned to open up the Council, with 36-45 members, non-permanent, all elected and based on regional representation.
“Out of 200 countries on earth that’s not too big. There should be no more categories of specific members because there would then be permanent members based on their economic strength. No, let’s be equal,” she argued.
She conceded: “Maybe we have to put up with the five permanent members for some time given they are the ones to decide whether they will be there or not.”
As for these countries who hold sway in the U.N., “even the smallest country like Malta has made more positive proposals in the common interest than any of the big countries. Size is not important, it’s what the countries have to say and contribute that matters.”
Nevertheless, Edith is no extremist in these proposals: “To some extent the permanent member idea and veto power has helped at times to avoid war, so I’m not entirely against the whole idea, but let’s not have them exercise their power to decide everything because they work in their national interests.”
But Edith declared herself firmly opposed to humanitarian military interventions: “Basically, it’s a faulty concept. To the extent that we know, the responsibility to protect doctrine is when a country cannot and will not protect its own citizens. Then the responsibility to intervene to protect citizens moves to the international community. But at that point you can only intervene militarily. That is not what the UN is here for, to wage war.” She argues that intervention should take place before it has to be with armed forces.
“I do not believe necessarily in economic sanctions because we know what that did to the population of Iraq,” she added. “The responsibility to protect human beings anywhere is a valid concept, but let’s really think it through how to do that. Obviously the UN would be the instrument but it’s not thought through. We have seen it practised to change regimes. Look at the mess we have seen where it has been applied so far. This concept and practice is not worthy of the UN.”
And so far as she is concerned, we need to look at our national organization as well as monitoring how the U.N. is operating: complaints of “the corruption and the selfishness and so on, the way the UN is used even by individuals placed on the staff” should send citizens back to their own systems: “The UN will never be better than the community of nations, including its citizens. So we have to look at home and see what we are doing, what is our own government doing, who are we electing?”
Her message: “To build a United Nations system and a community of nations that will work together peacefully is going to take a lot of work, and that work starts right at home.”
“I am convinced more than ever that we must agree to live together and that foreign policy is crucial and must be to live together in peace,” she told me. “We cannot afford to resort to military actions. We must use common sense more than ever to find peaceful solutions to conflicts.”
A 1989 history of WILPF, available at the Internet Archive (LINK), says of Edith: “For the better part of two decades, Edith Ballantyne has been known by many as the backbone of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. […] Edith took an office that was little more than a post-office box and developed it into a flourishing international centre.”
In 1976 she was elected President of the Conference of Non-Governmental Organizations (CONGO) at the UN and served for six years. Catherine Foster wrote: “She has acquired quite a reputation as a mediator. Yet she remains a rather unassuming and down-to-earth person who never avoids hard work.”
Edith remembers 1979 onwards as the period when the U.N. began to realize how important NGOs could be for the organization. The UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, otherwise not known as a shining example of internationalism, addressed the opening session of CONGO’s assembly. “Circumstances helped us,” said Edith. International civil servants “began to recognize that U.N. projects needed public support which the NGOs could help mobilize.”
She was also instrumental in ensuring that the world conference to mark the end of the U.N. Decade for Women in 1985 in Nairobi had a “peace tent” that Wikipedia reports became “a focal point of the conference. Daily sessions were held where women discussed the impacts of war on women and children”.
Edith remembered: “It was good to see the connections the vast majority of women in Nairobi made between peace, development, and equality.”
She faulted herself for not recognizing soon enough the importance of feminist activism in the 1970s: “I was engrossed in working for the prevention of war and for justice in the broad economic and social sense, which concerns both men and women. I didn’t pay enough attention to the double discrimination most women suffer and that fighting this had a place in work for peace, particularly in a women’s peace group.”
In her youth women had worked side by side with men in resistance against Nazism and in fighting for “justice for all peoples”.
“Younger women had to remind us that the struggle for peace and justice must include the struggle to eliminate discrimination and violence against women because it is all part of the same fight.” One result: “I have been making it my responsibility to get this message to my male colleagues in the peace movement.”
Her personal history is as stirring as her record in WILPF.
Born Edith Müller in Krnov, Czech Silesia, she fled to England from Nazism after the 1938 Sudeten Crisis (also known as the Munich betrayal that approved Nazis annexation of the Sudetenland). In 1939 the family landed in Canada and were placed as farmers in British Columbia. Unable to make a sustainable living, they moved to Toronto in 1941 where Edith found work as a domestic labourer, Wikipedia records. Edith says she was given a job as a maid in a mansion looking after the cooking. “I wasn’t a cook. I knew nothing!”
She still had to cook and clean. “It was the work of 12-14 hours every day with one half afternoon off. And one day the doorbell rang and someone from WILPF appeared and invited me to a meeting. They made sure my mistress was going to make sure I got to that meeting, told her that that was her obligation. And from then on my life changed.”
“I was discovered or picked up by the Toronto Branch of WILPF,” she told Felicity Ruby. “They had followed refugees from Hitler being settled in Canada and they realized they would probably be exploited, knowing very little about what their rights were. They contacted many of us when we ended up in Toronto and took me under their wing. I was 19 years old. Knowing very little English, they taught me English, and made me a member of WILPF.”
She reported: “The WILPF women knew there was an awful lot of exploitation by the big railroad companies, particularly, who were organizing settlements to clear land and promising eventually a little homestead somewhere.
“The branch had a settlement house, which is what they called them, and that’s where we often met and I got to know individual members. I used to spend a lot of time in their homes. Many of them were retired teachers so it was ideal for me. My goodness, if it hadn’t been for WILPF I don’t know what have happened to me. Pretty grim. The situation was very difficult for someone like me.”
She married Campbell Ballantyne, an official of the International Labour Office, in 1948 and moved with him to Geneva later that year. She began to work for the World Health Organization as a sub-editor in Official Records.
She left after five years to look after their four children. As Wikipedia reports it: “After 20 years of living in Geneva, she discovered that the headquarters of WILPF were located there and volunteered to serve in 1968. The following year, she became the Secretary General of the organization.” She headed the WILPF secretariat until 1992, becoming International President in 1992 until 1998.
WILPF itself was started by women from the suffrage movement in 1915. They held a Congress to protest war in the Hague. “1136 women from 12 countries in the midst of war […] Many more would have registered but were refused passports or stopped at borders or transport had broken down,” Edith observed. “They made it clear that it wasn’t a peace conference but a women’s congress to protest war and working for a system where war was impossible.”
The war went on for three years, and when the victorious powers met in Versailles, the women wanted to assemble there, too. But the French government would not allow German women into the country. So they met in Zurich and established a permanent organization that became known as Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.
“They denounced the Versailles Treaty because it made the losers pay heavily. They thought it was just the seed for another war,” Edith noted.
“They also began to lay down what kind of foundations would be necessary upon which a permanent peace could be constructed. Among those were from the very beginning a more just society – both economic and social and of course equality and equity between women and men; women’s rights were always one of the basic building stones for a permanent peace.”
In her 90s, Edith could still remember when socialism was considered an alternative to capitalism, until the collapse of the Soviet Union, and socialist systems vanished from Eastern Europe.
“It’s only now, again, beginning to be questioned because the system can’t cope with the challenges we have, especially in the environmental field and the question of resources. We have to find a different way of manufacture, of distribution if we don’t want to destroy this planet. But it’s really in a way going back. We do have to find alternatives to the system in which we live.”
With four children whose expenses at university in Canada would need to be financed, Edith said she had to find paying work when her youngest child was 12. “There was never really a question” as to whether [to go back to work] but volunteered with WILPF until the organization found her a part-time salary.
She made proposals to strengthen its international activities and the Executive Committee offered her a post in late 1969. “I felt a little guilty and had mixed feelings about accepting it. But no one else materialized to take the job, so I carried on and began to build up the office, with the help of others, of course.
“Though I had originally drifted into it, the league’s international work got hold of me and became a real commitment.”
Asked how she found time to bring up four children with her husband and work full-time, Edith told Catherine Foster: “Our children were pretty well grown by then. They had always shared in the housework, and they began to do more of that. Then one after the other left for university so that by 1975 my husband and I were alone. My husband had retired by then and worked only on short-term assignments. As he reduced his freelance work he took on more responsibility for the house. He said that, after all, I had stayed home for 15 years looking after the family so he could now do the same. I have a very supportive husband.”
WILFP, with offices in Geneva and New York, today has more than 4,500 members in 40 countries of six key regions around the world. It has consultative status with ECOSOC, UNCTAD, UNESCO and UNEP and Special Consultative Relations with FAO, ILO and UNICEF. Jane Addams, a WILPF founder and first international president, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 – at a time when the U.S. FBI dubbed her “the most dangerous woman in America” allegedly for trying to “emasculate our national defense” (LINK).
British lawyer Madeleine Rees has been Secretary-General since 2010. Sylvie Jacqueline Ndongmo, President of the International Board, is the founder of WILPF Cameroon and was the Section’s president until 2022. She is a teacher by profession and an African Union Trainer in peace support operations.
WILPF’s Swiss partners include the Swiss Foreign Ministry, Geneva’s Cultural Service, philanthropic bodies such as the Oak Foundation, the UN agencies UN Women, UNOHCR, UNHCR, and academic partners including the Geneva Graduate Institute.
On 5 December 2024 WILPF produced the 2nd edition of its 26-page Toolkit on Gender-Based Violence (GBV) (LINK). 5 December was the closing day of 2 weeks for organizations to celebrate International Women Human Rights Defenders, during which the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women was marked on 25 November.
The booklet, Building a World Without Violence, says WILPF, “explores the root causes of gender-based violence, its structural impact, and provides actionable tools for prevention and advocacy. Whether you’re an activist, policymaker, or community organizer, this toolkit equips you with insights and strategies to challenge harmful norms and create a safer, more equitable world.”
Of Switzerland WILPF observes: “Despite Switzerland’s progressive reputation, GBV remains widespread. WILPF Switzerland actively participates in the 16 Days of Activism against GBV, and in 2019, they mobilised hundreds of women activists and allies to participate in the national women’s strike, demanding an end to funding the arms trade. Their efforts united 150,000 women in Zurich and 500,000 throughout Switzerland, highlighting the need for systemic change and justice to combat GBV.”
Other recent publications have been an activism guide to reducing gun violence in Africa with 40 ideas for action, an advocacy document on amplifying the voices of women political prisoners in Iran (LINK). It is also vocal on the situation in Gaza and the U.N.’s climate negotiations as well as national issues (LINK). The Canton of Geneva hosted WILPF’s photographic exhibition “Men and Love in Times of Conflict and Polarization”, produced by the Mobilising Men for Feminist Peace Initiative, at the Parc de la Perle du Lac from 25-30 June (LINK).
On 26 November it made a joint statement with 90 other organizations calling on the Human Rights Council to establish a comprehensive investigative mechanism for Afghanistan. With other NGOs it afterwards published an assessment of the October resolution.
“The latest resolution on Afghanistan (57/3), adopted by the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) by consensus in October 2024, provides a blueprint for the action that is needed going forward,” the statement said. It stresses the ‘urgent and imperative need to ensure accountability, by bringing perpetrators of crimes involving violations and abuses of human rights and violations of international humanitarian law to justice through a comprehensive, multidimensional, survivor- and victim-centered, gender-responsive approach to accountability efforts, applying a comprehensive approach to transitional justice, and to prevent and redress human rights violations and abuses.’”
But it argued the mechanism should “integrate a gender perspective, a child’s right perspective and a survivor-centered approach”.
On 28 November 2024 Afghan snowboarder Musawer Khanzai published a post on the Young WILPF blog about his project to promote women’s rights in Afghanistan through art and tradition, Malalai Carpet (Instagram LINK). Musawer, a former national athlete for the Afghan National Snowboarding team, now lives and studies in Annecy, France where he got refugee status after fleeing Afghanistan when the Taliban took over.
“Sports serves as a powerful tool for advocacy by challenging societal norms and providing a platform for change,” Musawer writes. “In Afghanistan, where women often face restrictions, their participation in sports can defy stereotypes and inspire future generations.”
He adds: “As both an athlete and activist, I’ve seen how sports can amplify women’s voices, locally and globally, in a context where they are often dismissed. By supporting their participation, we create safe spaces, cultivate role models, and open doors for women to gain recognition, respect, and agency” (LINK).
In Afghanistan this is no longer possible: “Considering the Taliban’s oppressive regime restricting women’s rights, traditional forms of activism, like sports, are no longer effective. Women are denied the right to education, public speech, and basic freedoms, making it necessary to adapt our approach.” The craft project allows each woman weaving a piece to present her story. “In this way, art becomes a powerful tool for women to reclaim their voice in a society that tries to silence them,” he says.
Audio of interview by Felicity Ruby for The Green Institute (LINK)