Multi-stakeholder Forum on Addressing Hate Speech Through Education

Video message by Nada Al-Nashif, Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights

30 September 2021

Excellencies, Colleagues, Friends,

Human rights education is the most effective way of preventinghatred, discrimination and violence in all their forms, including hate speech – it fosters a universal culture of human rights, in which every person is equally deserving of dignity, respect and justice, and where diversities are embraced and valued.

Human rights education specifically addresses stereotypes, prejudices and attitudes that prompt hateful and discriminatory behaviours. By fostering critical thinking and developing knowledge and skills that allow learners to identify and claim human rights, human rights education helps learners to realize their own and other people’s biases and take action: it either changes behaviours or denounces violations towards the collective realization of human rights.

Within the formal education system, human rights education consists of complementary courses of action, including the training and professional development of teachers and other education personnel. It is about fostering learning environments where human rights are practiced.

We are pleased to be working with UNESCO in this spirit, on a joint project in Tunisia with several Ministries and the National Counter-Terrorism Commission, to empower the education system and school communities through promoting human rights, global citizenship education and media literacy. As part of this pilot project, our Office in Tunis supports the development of a national network of experts and trainers, through the training of educators and community leaders in the wider school community, on preventing violent extremism with a human rights-based approach.

For human rights education to fulfil its empowering potential, it needs to be contextualized, addressing specific human rights challenges that learners face in their lives, and offering responses that are consistent with human rights values. The use of participatory methodologies is therefore key to ensure that learners are responsible actors of their learning process.

The Office’s #Faith4Rights toolkit offers an example of bringing together tools by and for faith-based actors, including to address hate speech and protect religious or belief minorities. We have been piloting this peer-to-peer learning toolkit with faith-based organizations, academics and human rights mechanisms through a series of webinars that specifically address the challenges in the COVID-19 context.

Our Office and several Special Rapporteurs also contributed to the crash course on “Stomping out hate speech” - co-organized by the Office on Genocide Prevention and the UN Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute - as well as to the  open online course on freedom of expression, held jointly by UNESCO and the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights at the University of Oxford, bringing together close to 5000 participants.

Social media platforms have a key role to play – we continue to advocate stepping up efforts to meet their human rights responsibilities under the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, and have collaborated with Facebook, Google/YouTube and Twitter to better protect human rights defenders and respond to content that might constitute incitement to hostility, discrimination or violence.

Recent statistics illustrate the trend of increasing content moderation: during the second quarter of 2021, for example Facebook removed 31.5 million pieces of content as “hate speech”, which constitutes an increase of 716 percent compared to the same timeframe two years ago (Q2 of 2019: 4.4 million pieces removed as “hate speech”).

I am sure you have discussed Who defines what is considered as “hateful” and who has the ultimate power of deciding what is “good” or “bad” content. The UN Strategy and Plan of Action recognize that there is no international legal definition of “hate speech”and while we would problably recognise it when we hear it, the term “hate speech” risks being abused to impose uniformity of views, curtailing dissent and shrinking civic space with implications on social cohesion and peaceful co-existence, particularly in conflict-affected and fragile societies.

In conclusion, I would like to underscore our call for a strategicfocus on peer-to-peer learning and human rights education, as a major strategy to counter hate speech. The benefits of such a focus, especially in the context of addressing hate speech, make human rights education an investment in our future that we cannot afford to overlook.

Good luck with your continuing deliberations!