Éric Meslin, CEO of the Council of Canadian Academies

It's been 27 years since I last saw my friend Eric Meslin, who is currently Chairman and CEO of the Council of Canadian Academies. And we met again in Paris. 
At a time when the United States had decided to withdraw from UNESCO's programmes, he had been appointed as an 'observer' to UNESCO's International Bioethics Committee (IBC), which I chaired.

While no one knows what the future holds, it helps to enter a new year with an appreciation for the big issues that will likely dominate the global agenda. If one thing can already be said with certainty, it is that 2023 will not be boring.

In his article entitled “The End of History” published in 1989 after the fall of the Soviet bloc, Francis Fukuyama stated that liberal democracies had definitively wan over monarchy, fascism and communism. He argued that they had rang the death knell of all anti-democratic ideologies and thus constituted “the final form of human government”. Thirty years later, this assertion is put into question. Attacks against democracies from outside as well as from inside have never been as violent as they are now.

I have very fond memories of this very interesting discussion with the FIGroup teams on compliance on 12 June 2023. Inspired by the Anglo-Saxon world, this new, more responsible, and better shared way of managing the risks of all kinds that every company faces (corruption, climate, social and human rights) is an almost new idea in Europe.

When Putin decided on February 24, 2022 to seize - in a few days, he thought - Kiev and the rest of Ukraine, he was far from thinking that Europeans would be united in the face of this unprecedented aggression since the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938 and the subsequent invasions of the last world war.