Racial Discrimination and Protection of Minorities in UN Peace and Security Efforts, including Prevention: Opening remarks

                                                             Times of Crisis Pillar Summit

 

Racial Discrimination and Protection of Minorities in UN Peace and Security Efforts, including Prevention

 

7 December 2022

UPEACE, Costa Rica (Hybrid format) 

 

 

Madam Ilze Brands Kehris, United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights.

Prof. Mihir Kanade, Head of the Department of International Law and UPEACE Academic Coordinator

Dear students and members of the UPEACE community

 

Welcome to the University for Peace, an institution created by the General Assembly of the United Nations, at the proposal of the Government of Costa Rica, which offered to the institution and to humanity, this beautiful piece of the last primary forest in the central valley of San Jose, with the sole purpose of offering the international community a space for reflection and study about sustainable peace.

 

For us the opportunity to work with OHCHR is an important occasion to be able to share and work together to achieve the mandates that the international community has given to both institutions.


 

The University works on issues related to peace in three main lines: 1. conflict analysis, with areas of concentration on international conflicts, gender perspectives from a cross-cutting vision, peace education, religion and media in peacebuilding; 2. the environment and its various approaches, such as climate change, food security and natural resource management; and finally, international dispute resolution and human rights.

 

As a professor in the international law and human rights department, I am not going to defend the importance of the subject, because I am not going to preach to the converted.  However, I would like to elaborate on some of the aspects of what we teach in human rights. 

 

In every class, we reiterate to the students, Human rights are indivisible, interdependent, and interrelated.

 

This means that different human rights are intrinsically connected and cannot be viewed as isolated from each other. The enjoyment of one right depends on the enjoyment of many other rights and no right is more important than the rest. But also, we teach that the interpretation of human rights is progressive…. That when society reaches a certain level of institutional advancement and consolidation of human rights, there is no return, no way back.  Today, we know that reality is teaching us that societies are changing, the understanding of the progressive realization of human rights is more challenging than ever.

 

Why are we here... why are we revisiting such basic issues as the protection of minorities?

 

Let me share an anecdote about some of the recent work, we are doing here at UPEACE.

 

A year ago, we launched the Peace and Innovation Initiative, what we must do to innovate in sustainable peacebuilding. We all know how innovation is advancing in several very clear areas, health, engineering and weapons, but what is new in peace?: very little.  

 

So, we have organized workshops and consultations in different places, at the UN in NY in Geneva and, also at the Global South. A month ago, we were at Yale University, discussing important issues around innovation, and a professor of international relations began to address the importance of genocide studies. 

 

I looked at him and thought of Rafael Lekin and his struggle to create that very special crime called genocide, and I also thought, since the Akayesu decision in the “Special Tribunal for Rwanda”, what else should we monitor.

 

 However, this professor, I insist,  of international relations, revisited the concept of genocide, not from a legal dimension, but rather from a sociological and international relations perspective, and its importance in the current context, which left me thoughtful and perhaps innovation is in areas of peace, to return to the basic concepts and reinterpret them within new glasses.   At the legal world we think about genocide as the first crime of the Rome Statute, and the incredible complexities of the evidence around the case. 

 

However, is it not genocide about racial discrimination and minorities? 

 

In that same meeting, with some of our colleagues, we insisted on the idea: don't think outside the box. Use what you have inside the box and start using it. 

 

The idea of the UN Network on Racial Discrimination and Protection of Minorities is to rethink the basic issues, such as racial discrimination and protection of minorities, which to a large extent were basic topics of discussion in the area of human rights, to adapt them to the new challenges, which crises such as the pandemic or the war in Ukraine, but also in various parts of the world, are forcing us to look back to understand what is happening and to avoid the mistakes of the past.

 

For the University it is an honour and a great opportunity to join forces in this collective effort to think about the future to achieve human rights for all, leaving no one behind. 


Picture: Ambassador Csaba Korosi, President of the 77 United Nations General Assembly, addressing the meeting. 


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