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According to UN High Commissioner Volker Türk, a future is emerging that we do not want. With this gloomy assessment he opened the autumn session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva.
How bad things are with human rights was made clear by a comment by Vaclav Balek, President of the UN Human Rights Council, at the opening of the session. He felt compelled to point out something that should be completely self-evident. States are not allowed to intimidate, persecute or even kill people who cooperate with the highest UN human rights body.
The fist is back.
There are good reasons for the warning. Because in fact, that’s exactly what authoritarian regimes do.
Nonchalance in the face of fate
The report by High Commissioner Volker Türk on the current human rights situation worldwide was by no means more encouraging. In many places one can recognize “the old, brutal politics of oppression. More and more military coups, authoritarianism and the destruction of all resistance – in short: the fist is back.” According to Türk, all the recent coups in Africa are certainly not a solution – although parts of the population sometimes support the putschists.
The list of countries to which the Austrians give terrible censorship is long. Last but not least, it includes major and middle powers such as China, Russia and Iran. At the same time, Türk is irritated by the nonchalance of many – including Western – governments and often the public in view of the fate of migrants in the Mediterranean, but also in view of the acute housing shortage and the increasing lack of prospects for young people in dozens of countries.
And he deplores the tendencies of governments, groups and individuals to wantonly stir up strife and deepen rifts. The increasing number of Koran burnings is just one example.
On the way to failure
The High Commissioner for Human Rights has just returned from a trip to Iraq and reports how once-blossoming palm tree landscapes there have been transformed into dust and rubble – with enormous environmental pollution at the same time. Crimes against the environment, for which he considers the term ecocide appropriate, should finally be punishable.
For Volker Türk, the world is moving in completely the wrong direction. Instead of being a milestone in human progress, the extremely ambitious UN Agenda 2030 with its climate and development goals is becoming a tragic monument to human failure.