Khartoum: Protecting aid workers moved up the European agenda on 15 and 16 October 2026, when the European Commission and the Irish Presidency of the Council hosted the first international conference on the protection of humanitarian personnel. The meeting followed what the Commission calls a record year of violence, in which 1,187 aid workers were killed, injured, kidnapped or detained worldwide in 2025.
Commissioner Hadja Lahbib used the occasion to say that the EU has committed €3.5 million in 2026 through its Protect Aid Workers initiative. The money pays for protection measures, post-incident assistance and legal support for staff who face threats and violence. Lahbib told the conference that humanitarian workers are not the collateral damage of war.
She also warned that drones increasingly kill people who deliver aid, and she described their safety as a top priority. For field organisations, protecting aid workers now means far more than armoured vehicles and check-in routines. It also covers legal advice, support after an attack and the slow work of holding attackers to account.
The conference set out to build momentum behind Australia’s humanitarian personnel declaration and the Global Initiative on international humanitarian law. Participants also aimed to reaffirm the EU’s commitment to humanitarian diplomacy, to address accountability for attacks, to share practical initiatives and to widen the group of states that commit to protecting aid workers.
The International Rescue Committee reported that aid worker deaths came close to a record in 2025, driven mainly by the wars in Gaza and Sudan. Those two conflicts explain why the topic reached ministerial level. In both, relief convoys, clinics and warehouses have worked close to front lines, and the people who staff them are mostly local employees of aid groups.
The €3.5 million is small beside the EU’s total humanitarian budget, which the Commission set at €1.9 billion for 2026. Its value lies in where it goes, because protecting aid workers depends on dull items such as insurance, legal fees and counselling. Legal support and post-incident care rarely attract donors, yet they decide whether a threatened employee can stay in the job or leaves the field for good.
Accountability is the harder half of protecting aid workers. A declaration only matters if investigators can establish who attacked a convoy or a compound, and if states act on the findings. The conference gave governments a place to compare approaches, but it did not create a new enforcement body.
Whether the meeting changes behaviour on the ground will show in the casualty counts for 2026. Until then, protecting aid workers remains a test of how much weight international humanitarian law still carries in modern conflicts, and the new funding shows that the EU intends to pay for practical help alongside its diplomacy.
