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Stakeout Volker Türk 12 December 2023
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15:18
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MP4
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1.1 GB
Press Conferences | OHCHR , UNITED NATIONS
Stakeout Volker Türk 12 December 2023
Stake out / Point de presse
Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR)
Subject:
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk remarks to the press at the end of the two-day High Level Event marking 75 years of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Speaker:
Volker Türk, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
Teleprompter
Good evening, everyone.
Thank you for joining us.
I'll very quickly pass the floor to the UN **** Commissioner for Human Rights, Volcker Turk.
He has a few short opening remarks and then we'll take some questions.
Hi, Commissioner, please.
Well, thank you very much.
I, I thought it would be good to after this very intense 2 days to give you a quick update on what for us in the Human Rights office has been an incredibly important culmination of Human Rights 75 with this **** level event that has just taken place here in the Palais over the last two days.
We actually had some over 2000 participants here, but many of, and then we had in addition a couple of thousand online.
So we had, I think, very important level of participation and especially in this very difficult but also sombre moment, it was incredibly important for us to rekindle the spirit, the momentum, but also the actual content and the essence of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
And I think it was good that we had heads of state, Heads of Government, ministers, civil society, organisation from all continents, from many different countries, parliaments, business enterprises come to Geneva to have real discussions, but also to make pledges.
And I just want to say for me, the important outcome is the pledges that we got from over 150 countries, some of them very substantial, some of them ranging from gender equality to the abolition of the death penalty, to instituting legislative changes and legal reform.
And you will actually we will publish all these these pledges.
And we're also committed to following them up with the ones who did it.
But we also had pledges from civil society organisation over 70, from international organisations, from parliaments, from businesses, from all stakeholders of the human rights constituency and community.
I'm also pleased to say that we had very strong participation of people under 25.
We had 120 participants and we had our youth advisory group and they came forward with a very strong youth declaration, which will help us really craft and take stock of this whole year, Take stock of the substance, take stock of the essence and come up with a vision statement for the future that will also, we hope, feed very much into the summit of the future that will take place next year in New York.
And yeah, I just wanted to mention this to all of you because I think it's also important that you get a first readout from some of the key takeaways that we have from from this very important event.
Thank.
You **** Commissioner questions, Nina, and then Lojo and then Gabriel.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
There have been lots of beautiful and very and nice words about the importance and the strength of human rights.
At the same time, you see the absolute catastrophe that's unfolding in Gaza.
And there was the Palestinian foreign minister who was here today, who was, who was upset with the international community saying it's not living up to its responsibility towards what he and many others describe as a genocide in in Gaza.
I'm wondering what you think about that and what I mean, what can your office, what can bring to a situation like this besides these words?
Thank.
You, I mean, it's clear and which is also the reason why we decided to make it very important for everyone to actually go back to the basics and the fundaments of the international legal framework as it was established in the wake of the Second World War.
And one of the key pieces is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
There's always been a promise.
We have seen the achievements.
This event also allowed us to look at the failures.
And one of the failures is of course, the lack of implementation.
We have seen implementation.
That's not only say that there have been no successes, we have seen the achievements.
I mean, if we look back 75 years ago, the world did look quite differently.
But it is also important that we learn the lessons and we actually put the emphasis on implementation.
And it was very important therefore, that we had state representatives at senior level attend this meeting because at the end of the day, it is about political leadership in the current crisis, but also in many other situations where we have still, let's not forget 55 conflicts around the world.
And we need the political leadership to embrace human rights and make it the core and essence of every and any decision that they take.
And that's really the message back to everyone.
Take human rights seriously, more seriously and make it central to your policy making and decisions.
Yeah, thank you.
Sorry for my voice.
You mentioned the pledges.
What would you have liked to see as a pledge or pledges that wasn't addressed by the different stakeholders?
I mean, just to give you, I have actually a little bit more information on this.
So we had pledges on the ratification of international human rights instruments, which is always good.
We had, as I said, 5 pledges, concrete pledges to abolish the death penalty.
You know, we are all wanting to see the death penalty abolished everywhere around the world in the 21st century and sooner rather than later.
We have a number of important pledges on women's rights and gender equality.
In fact, this was a quite a large number of pledges, including inequalities and discrimination issues.
We had also a pledge or pledges on the promotion and protection of the rights of older people, including to open negotiations on a specific instrument on all the human rights of older people.
Because that was one of the lessons learnt from the COVID pandemic, climate change, especially climate change, human, human rights, climate justice and resilience and strong commitments from some states to protect human rights defenders, journalists, civic space and combat hate speech.
And of course, then also pledges on the digital edge.
What I, well, I mean, we take what we get.
It's a good basis to get more ambition next time and to work on on what we have got, we've got.
A few few pledges on funding as well in.
Addition.
Perhaps we would like to see more of, if I may add, Gabrielle, please.
You're right, **** Commission to be be told by my spokesman, of course we want more funding.
I mean, I said it in my in my closing remarks, I mean the third pillar of not the third, that's one of the three pillars, as you know is human rights.
And of course, we want to see much more funding for the human and we got some pledges to increase our funding, but we want more.
Hi, Commissioner.
Just to go back on my colleague Nina's question.
The Palestinian foreign Minister said the situation in Gaza was an utter failure of the international system.
He phrased it this way.
Do you agree with this statement?
And, and if, if there's anything is there, can the human rights system or the international system see any success here?
Thank you.
Well, I mean, it's clear you had the Secretary General talk about the paralysis of the Security Council when it comes to peace and, and, and security affairs in a number of situations, including the one in the Middle East and in, in Gaza.
I mean, it is clear if you look at the humanitarian situation at the moment, it is so precarious that the Secretary General, while all of us have been saying what we had to say, including our humanitarian colleagues, because it's, it's, I don't even know what word to find in terms of precariousness.
I don't know whether you can give me a better word than precarious.
It's extremely precarious.
I mean, it's on the verge of, of well beyond breakdown.
So of course there is a Clarion call for everyone and for the international institutions that deal with it to take it very seriously and to act on it.
What has that got to do with human rights?
It's again about implementation.
And it's also, frankly, if I look at the work that my office has been doing over many years, it's to take human rights more seriously and to heat the coals and to heat our recommendations and to take them more seriously because, you know, we have made so many recommendations on, on the, on, on, on the past.
Unfortunately, they weren't taken seriously enough.
So the question is learn from it and take human rights more seriously, including from a prevention perspective.
And I hope that we achieved a little bit of this during these two days.
We've got two more questions and then I'm afraid he's got more bilaterals to go back.
To Rusa and then Kathleen.
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