When aid institutions fail to protect their own: The moral test exposed by Yemen

The 2026 Aid Worker Security Report confirms what many in the humanitarian community have long feared: 2025 was again the worst year on record for humanitarian workers. A staggering 1,187 aid workers were killed, wounded, kidnapped, or arbitrarily detained while carrying out humanitarian work.

While the horrors of Gaza and Sudan account for the greatest loss of humanitarian lives, Yemen now stands as the world's worst crisis for the arbitrary detention of humanitarians.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the case of the UN's own staff, dozens of whom have been arbitrarily detained by the Houthis for two years now. Many have endured physical violence, solitary confinement, incommunicado detention, coercive interrogations, and restricted access to food, water, and sanitation. Their families don’t know whether they’re alive, or if and when they will return home.

This year's World Humanitarian Day is not only a reminder of those still detained. It is a defining test of the United Nations: After two years of such limited progress, is the institution now ready to honestly re-evaluate its approach and demonstrate an unequivocal commitment to protecting and coming to the aid of those who risk their lives in its service?

Those detained are national staff, the local professionals who form the backbone of every humanitarian operation. They understand the language, the culture, and the communities they serve. Without them, humanitarian assistance would simply not function. Yet their central role in UN work is not reflected in the urgency of the response.

Those closest to the crisis are starting to ask an uncomfortable question: Would it have unfolded differently had those detained been international staff? If the answer is yes, or even possibly yes, then the problem extends beyond institutional weakness.

The arbitrary detention of humanitarian personnel is not simply an attack on individuals. It is an attack on the principle that humanitarian action must remain possible, even in war.

Those detained are neither combatants nor political actors, but professionals dedicated to serving communities affected by conflict, deprivation, and insecurity.

This is not a single incident. Across the world, state and de facto authorities are increasingly criminalising humanitarian work. When humanitarians are detained, entire communities lose access to lifesaving assistance. Protecting those who deliver aid is therefore inseparable from protecting the civilians who depend on it.

The international community has recognised the urgency of this challenge.

UN Security Council Resolution 2730 reaffirmed the obligation to protect humanitarian personnel and strengthen accountability for attacks against them. The European Commission's recent Communication on Humanitarian Action likewise places the protection of humanitarian workers and accountability at the heart of humanitarian policy. Australia's Declaration for the Protection of Humanitarian Personnel builds on these commitments by calling on states to translate international law into practical action and stronger protection.

Humanitarian workers and their families expect these commitments to be matched by visible leadership, accountability and decisive action. Yemen is where those commitments are now being tested.

A dangerous precedent

That a number of UN staff arbitrarily detained in Yemen now face death sentences sets a dangerous precedent that takes the erosion of humanitarian protection and the principle of functional immunity to the next level.

In November 2025, a Houthi court sentenced 17 humanitarian-affiliated staff – three of them from the UN and all of them national staff – to death by firing squad on espionage charges; the sentences remain under appeal.

If left unanswered, this risks normalising the prosecution and sentencing of humanitarians simply for doing their jobs. Coming after the unprecedented killing of UN personnel in Gaza, these sentences send a terrifying message: Humanitarian workers can be detained, prosecuted, and even sentenced to death with impunity.

If the international community allows this precedent to stand, every UN mission and humanitarian operation around the world becomes exponentially more dangerous. The UN's senior leadership must recognise that what is unfolding in Yemen is not a country-specific crisis. It is a challenge to the safety, independence and future protection of UN personnel and humanitarian workers everywhere.

Yet the institutional response to date has been more procedural than reflecting urgency. Typically, across the humanitarian system, responsibility becomes dispersed across departments and reporting lines. Procedures multiply, committees are formed, and decisions move slowly. No organisation consciously designs such a system, but too often process replaces leadership.

One decision, in particular, came to symbolise the perceived failure of visible commitment of UN leadership. The senior leadership for Yemen proceeded with previously planned summer leave shortly after the mass arrests. There may have been entirely legitimate reasons, and many undoubtedly continued working remotely. But institutions communicate through symbols as much as through decisions. For colleagues and families desperately seeking reassurance that the UN fully grasped the gravity of the crisis, the message it sent was devastating.

History repeatedly shows that institutions are judged not during routine periods but in moments of profound uncertainty. Rwanda, Sudan, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and now Yemen all remind us that moral leadership is ultimately measured by the willingness to act when the political costs are highest.

Every humanitarian organisation depends upon trust. Staff accept dangerous assignments because they believe their institution will stand behind them if the worst occurs. Once that belief begins to fracture, the damage spreads throughout the organisation. Cynicism deepens. Confidence erodes.

The detained UN personnel deserve far more than the repeated carefully worded statements of concern. They deserve visible leadership and relentless advocacy. They deserve to know that every diplomatic, political, and institutional avenue is being pursued until they are free.

The duty to stand by those who serve

Because the implications extend far beyond Yemen, the response must now be led at the highest political level of the United Nations. The Secretary-General should appoint a dedicated Under-Secretary-General as Special Envoy with a single mandate: to engage all relevant governments and parties to secure the immediate release of the detained humanitarian personnel.

Such an appointment would demonstrate that the organisation understands what is at stake; not simply the fate of those imprisoned today, but the protection of every UN staff member, and by extension every humanitarian worker, who may find themselves at risk tomorrow.

In conversations with affected family members and colleagues, there is a word that many are using privately, but that institutions have yet to reckon with publicly: betrayal. That word is earned in every week that passes without a meaningful update, in every unanswered question about what is being done, in every public statement that offers words of concern without evidence of action.

For a detainee, the fear that colleagues are going about their work, that institutional life continues, that no visible effort is being made to secure their release, is an unbearable daily reality lived inside a prison cell. It compounds the suffering of captivity with something arguably harder to bear: the sense of having been abandoned by the institutions they chose to serve.

For families, the experience is no less acute. They are left to navigate uncertainty alone, without information, without reassurance, and without any credible sense that the institution shares the urgency they feel every waking hour. Our work with former detainees and their families shows that the consequences of detention and prolonged uncertainty can continue to shape their lives long after release.

This is not a communications failure. It is a failure of duty of care. If humanitarian institutions cannot convincingly protect and stand behind those who serve in their name, the very real risk is the erosion not only of the confidence of their own staff but of confidence in humanitarian action itself. And unlike the detentions themselves, that failure is entirely within the power of the United Nations to remedy.

On this World Humanitarian Day, honouring humanitarian workers must mean more than remembering those killed or detained. It must mean standing behind those still serving – and proving that, when the worst happens, the institutions they serve will not abandon them.