Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards

Volker Türk speaking to journalists after a press briefing at the Palais des Nations in Geneva, 24 May 2023. (Geneva Solutions/Paula Dupraz-Dobias)

Gabriela Galindo on 24 May 2023 in Geneva Solutions reports that Volker Türk said that $800 million are needed yearly, noting rich nations are quick to splurge when it comes to banks or the military, but not ‘when it comes to people’.

Dire humanitarian crises are piling up across the world, yet the United Nations’ human rights watchdog is still strapped for cash, its chief warned Wednesday.

The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has its hands full as it races to respond to the human rights impacts of climate-driven and manmade disasters, state-sponsored discrimination and full-out conflict, its chief, Volker Türk, told a press conference in Geneva. See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2022/09/15/new-high-commissioner-for-human-rights-volker-turk-the-man-for-an-impossible-job/

But as these parallel crises continue to flare and some spiral, Türk warned that his organisation was running on empty and chided global leaders for not taking human rights funding more “seriously”.

“The needs have exponentially increased, but there isn’t the commensurate funding available on the humanitarian front – that’s just the reality,” he said. “And, unfortunately, that trend has been there for quite a number of years.”

“We have this combination of protracted conflict situations; we have the increase in new and emerging crises and [in] both non-international armed conflict and international armed conflict,” he said, referring to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Responding to a question on their funding needs, the UN rights chief said he “would want to see a doubling, which would be about $800 million per year, for the organisation”s

Türk addressed a grim roster of situations currently followed by the OHCHR, where human rights were being trampled on amid active armed conflicts, including in Sudan and Ukraine, or at the hands of authoritarian governments in Myanmar and Iran.

In Sudan, he said that the “senseless” fighting between two generals vying for power had civilians “besieged” as ceasefires were broken and added that his office had documented at least 25 cases of sexual violence…

The high commissioner slammed policies stripping women and girls of their rights in Afghanistan and those criminalising LGBTQ+ communities in Uganda. He also pointed to Beijing’s crackdown against human rights defenders as a sign of “shrinking civic space” in China.

Türk added that he was “deeply troubled by the growing phenomenon of anti-rights movements” targeting asylum seekers in the US and Europe as “hateful narratives against migrants and refugees also continue to proliferate”, spurring “anti-migrant” laws and policies that undermine basic human rights and international refugee laws.

“The developments that are unfolding in various countries including the United Kingdom, the US, Italy, Greece and Lebanon are particularly concerning,” he said, as they “appear designed” to hinder the right to seek asylum, to penalise citizens for assisting those in need or to organise returns in “unlawful, undignified and unsustainable ways”.

“We have some [crises] in the headlines all the time, but others are not. Haiti is a good example. There seems to be (…) no sense of urgency when it comes to dealing with a situation like this.”..

“When you look at how quickly billions can be made available when there is a banking crisis or and – I’m sure, rightly so – including military expenditure and so forth… when it comes to people and the plight of people, there doesn’t seem to be the same,” he said.

“Donor countries, they have a budget for peace and security, they have a budget for development (…) but they don’t actually have a budget down for human rights,” he said. “It is actually important to take human rights seriously, not just by (…) coming to the [UN Human Rights] Council and having all these discussions here and working with us, but also by having and increasing the funding for the organisation.”