Le 20 octobre 2026, à la Ferme de Marsillon, j’ai ouvert la conférence du Geneva Center for Neutrality « Outer Space and the Future of Global Stability », consacrée à une question : l’espace peut-il rester un domaine neutre ? Voici le texte de mon discours, prononcé en anglais.
Good evening, and welcome to the Ferme de Marsillon. Thank you, Raimondo Pictet, for opening this house to us; thank you to our three speakers, Colonel (GS) Ludovic Monnerat, Commander of the Swiss Space Command, Philip Hamelink, CEO of WISeSat, and Dr Benjamin Guyot, CEO of Spacetalk; and thank you to Katy Cojuhari for moderating the discussion tonight.
In the 90 seconds it took you to find your seat, about a dozen satellites crossed the sky above Troinex. One of them timed your card payment on the way here. Another told your phone where it was. A third will decide whether tomorrow’s weather forecast is right.
None of us saw them. All of us depend on them. Before we ask whether space can be neutral, we owe ourselves two definitions, because both words are used far more often than they are understood.
Neutrality, in its legal sense, is a status in war, defined by the Hague Conventions of 1907: a neutral state takes no part in the conflict, treats the belligerents impartially, which means among other things that it does not supply them with weapons, and keeps them off its territory.
Where does space begin? Nobody has agreed. Engineers use the Kármán line, about a hundred kilometres up, where the air is too thin for wings. Lawyers have never fixed a boundary, and the states that could prefer not to. Outer space is the only domain of human activity with no agreed frontier.
Nonetheless, there is a treaty. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, signed by every space power, the United States, Russia, China, India, Japan, the European powers and Switzerland among them, makes four promises:
1. Space is the province of all mankind.
2. No state may appropriate it, by claim, by occupation or by any other means.
3. No weapon of mass destruction may be placed in orbit.
4. The Moon and other celestial bodies shall be used exclusively for peaceful purposes.
I also invite you to read what it does not say. It does not ban conventional weapons in orbit. It says nothing about private companies, because in 1967 there were none. And it says nothing about what has changed most since: what is actually up there.
In 1967 there were a few hundred satellites. Today there are more than ten thousand active ones, most of them launched in the last five years, most of them owned not by states but by companies. They carry communications, navigation, weather, the time signals behind every bank transfer, intelligence and, increasingly, military command. Almost every one is dual use: the satellite that guides an ambulance guides a missile. Space is no longer a frontier. It is the plumbing of the modern economy, plumbing that belongs to no one and that anyone can break.
Put the two definitions side by side and you see the problem. Neutrality is a law of territory. Space is a domain where territory is forbidden. On the strict reading, the sceptics are right: « neutral space » in the Hague sense is a utopia.
But space is nonetheless a neutrality question, in three ways.
The first is dependence. A neutral state that depends on a foreign power for its weapons is not neutral for long. A neutral state that depends on a foreign constellation for its communications, its navigation and its payments is in exactly the same position. It has simply moved the problem four hundred kilometres up.
The second is dual use. If the same satellite guides the ambulance and the missile, the distinction between military and civilian targets, on which both neutrality and the law of war depend, breaks down in orbit. Disable a navigation constellation and you do not strike one state. You strike every hospital, port and bank that used it, including those of neutrals.
The third is the private actor. In 1907 only states mattered. In orbit today the actor who holds the critical infrastructure, and the critical data, is very often a company in a third jurisdiction, with its own lawyers and its own shareholders. The Hague has nothing to say to it. Neither, yet, does Geneva.
So if neutrality is to mean anything beyond Earth, it has to stop being a line and become a function. Not neutral space, which cannot exist, but neutral actors and neutral infrastructure in space, which can.
So here is where we stand. Neutrality is a law of soil. Space has no soil. The treaty that governs it is nearly sixty years old, says nothing about companies, and bans the one weapon nobody uses up there. Meanwhile four states have destroyed their own satellites in orbit, a commercial network hacked on the first morning of a war cut the remote control of thousands of wind turbines in a country not at war, and an army’s connectivity came to depend on one chief executive. Rules are easy to write when nobody needs them and impossible once everybody does. We are in the short window in between.
The Geneva Center for Neutrality does not pretend to have the answer. Our position is a starting point, and it is this: neutral space, as a territory, is a utopia; neutral actors and neutral infrastructure in space are not. Whether that is right, and what it would take, is exactly what tonight is for. We have on this stage the officer who commands the Swiss Space Command, a company that puts satellites into orbit, and a space lawyer who now leads Spacetalk. They see this from three different places. I would rather hear them disagree than agree.
One question to carry through the evening. Looking back from 2040, which decision taken today will have determined whether outer space became a battlefield, or humanity’s last neutral territory?
Thank you.