United Nations – In your harshest warning to date hate movements around the world, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the World Human Rights Council in Geneva on Monday that the world needed to “intensify the fight against resurgent neo-Nazism, white supremacy and racial and ethnic terrorism “.
“The danger of these hate-driven movements is growing every day,” the UN chief said, noting that while he believed they already represented the most important internal challenge for several countries, they were also coming at the borders and becoming “more of a threat of national terror. They are becoming a transnational threat.”
Guterres addressed the well-documented increase in the impact of racism around the world and said: “People and groups are involved in a hate food frenzy: fundraising, recruitment and online communication both at home and abroad. abroad, traveling internationally to train together and network. their hateful ideologies. “
“Too often,” the secretary-general said, “these hate groups are encouraged by people in positions of responsibility in ways that were considered unimaginable not long ago.”
For many listeners, including Richard Gowan, director of the United Nations International Crisis Group (ICG), one of the aims of this last observation was clear.
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“Guterres worked very hard to establish a working relationship with Trump while in office, which I imagine was often very hard, and that seems like a reasonably subtle but firm rejection of the former president,” he told CBS News.
“The deepest wells of injustice”
The UN chief’s speech highlighted the “most widespread violation of all human rights: gender inequality,” which he said was “fueled by two of the deepest wells of injustice in our world: the legacy of centuries of colonialism and the persistence of millennia, of patriarchy “.
Guterres welcomed the commitment of President Joe Biden to re-engage with the UN and the election of Mr Biden as UN ambassador. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who is expected to be at UN headquarters on Thursday, awaiting Senate confirmation, has championed human rights and diversity around the world.
“Guterres has raised these issues before, but he has more political space to highlight these issues now that Biden is in office,” Gowan said.
Michelle Bachelet, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, told the Council that over the past year, another factor has contributed to, or at least revealed, inequality within societies: pandemic he tore off the mask of the mortal realities of discrimination; deep inequalities; and chronic underfunding of essential services and rights, all largely ignored by many policymakers. “
With his statements to the Human Rights Council, the UN chief tried not only to highlight what he considers the increase in human rights abuses, but to unite leaders to work on it: “When we allow the denigration of any of we set the precedent for the demonization of all of us. “