Students' United Nations 2021 session

Statement by Michelle Bachelet, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights

24 June 2021

Greetings to all of you. It is genuinely a pleasure to be invited to speak to a group of young people who are interested in working out some of our global problems by mirroring the UN General Assembly's debates. 

I want to thank and celebrate those of you who speak up and defend human rights.

Many children and young people have been leading community actions to help people whose lives and livelihoods have been devastated by COVID-19 and its social and economic impacts. Others have rightly injected a sense of urgency and outrage about our global environmental crisis.

I also want to express my respect to all of you for managing these long pandemic months of social distancing in your schools and universities. It seems to me certain that this resilience and dedication to learning will serve you well in your future lives. Because you have not only done this work in a context of remote learning, social isolation and perhaps sorrow and fear. You have done it in a broader context of global suffering – rising poverty and inequality, faltering economies – as well as protests about harsh and systemic racism in many societies, and the looming threat of climate change.

Please understand: I do believe there are practical, doable solutions to these trends. I think one first step towards those solutions could be the work that you're thinking about here, at the Students' United Nations. Let me explain. 

The pandemic may have prompted you to reflect about the connections that bind us all together. All human beings, no matter where we live, how rich or poor we are, our sex or race – or any other characteristic – we feel pain; we feel compassion; and we are committed to building a safe and satisfying future for the children we may have, and future generations.

Infectious diseases do this – and I'm speaking here as a medical doctor, and a former Head of State, as well as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. They demonstrate very painfully and clearly that there is no such thing as a faraway country. What happens to people in other places affects us – not only because we, too can be infected, but because supply lines that our economies count on will be shattered; political turmoil and grievances will spread; and most importantly: the destinies of people from different countries, communities, social classes and circumstances affect us all, on a human level.

The pandemic may have also inspired you to think about the need for strong, responsive policies and institutions. On a local and national level, it has been clear that in countries with long-standing measures for universal health care and the human right to social protection, people have broadly speaking managed to weather the crisis in better shape.

In many other countries where health care is usually only available for a price – and where huge numbers of people cannot usually count on sick pay or unemployment insurance – policy-makers scrambled to set up temporary measures. (And by the way, I think this in itself constitutes an acknowledgement that upholding the human rights to health and to social protection aren't only the right thing to do - they're also the smart thing to do).

Globally, it has been equally clear that disarray, and the refusal by many States to coordinate policies and act with solidarity, have been very harmful to humanity as a whole.

To me, one key lesson from this crisis is the need to overcome the many political differences that may divide us, and to seek peaceful and meaningful ways to solve issues together. Of course there are conflicts of interest – economic, social, ideological, all kinds of differences. But we need to grasp that working together with solidarity, trying to find common ground and areas where we can mutually assist each other, can we solve our problems and create a more fair and sustainable future.

Another key lesson that I take away from this terrible experience is the deep protective value of human rights. 

Everywhere, we need to see a concerted and comprehensive effort to upgrade health-care systems; improve access to social protection; ensure decent work and adequate shelter; combat inequalities; and end discrimination of every kind.

We should be building a new economic paradigm that is sustainable, inclusive and green – helping people become more resilient to crises by reducing inequalities and promoting human dignity.

It should be clear to every policy-maker that greater efforts to fulfill human rights and achieve the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development would have mitigated a great deal of the suffering we see today – and we urgently need to advance in those directions to enable us to combat and recover from COVID-19.

To do this requires institutions that are transparent, participatory and accountable. Wherever the opposite takes hold – corruption, repression, impunity – we will find grievances and mistrust. We will see the failure to empower everyone in society to contribute to the full extent of their capacity.

I want to emphasise this point, because it must be clear that discrimination does not only harm the individuals who are directly targeted. It impoverishes all of us.

The  pandemic has again reminded us of the many devastating impacts of racism, for example. Around the world, communities that are burdened with systemic and long standing discrimination have suffered disproportionate deaths, as well as far higher poverty rates, child dropout rates and other negative impacts. We have once again witnessed the vicious cycle formed by racism, discrimination and poverty, with discrimination leading to economic deprivation, and poverty heightening the multiple impacts of bigotry.

Like racism, discrimination against women and girls is a terrible and comprehensive violation of the individuals who are targeted – and it is also a major obstacle to development. It weakens all of society. It harms everyone.

Combatting all forms of discrimination should be a core priority for every country and community – perhaps every human being.

We all need each other. And we all need justice. All of us are navigating new challenges, in unmapped territory. And it is precisely in such times of crisis that we need sound principles to guide our path. Just as individuals have been made more vulnerable to COVID-19 by comorbidities, many underlying and long-standing human rights gaps and failings on inequalities, climate change and other critical issues have generated terrible vulnerabilities for entire societies and regions.

When the leaders of States turn away from shared principles and the search for shared solutions to global problems, that leads to increasing suffering and chaos. We have seen it. But the opposite is also true – when we can identify principles that all of us share, and act on them, we can generate surprisingly rapid and transformative change.

Let me tell you a story.

When I was about your age, I had no idea of becoming a politician, or an activist. I thought about becoming a vet, because I liked animals, but I wanted to help other people, so I went into medicine. Then a coup d'état took place in my country, Chile. My father was detained and tortured. Ultimately the torture killed him. My mother and I were also detained, for a shorter time, and then released. We went into exile, first in Australia, then in Germany. So I learned German, I kept pursuing my medical studies, and I even had a baby boy.

But I wasn't German, I was Chilean, and my people were suffering. I could never shake the desire to go back and try to help people. When I my son was eight months old, I went back. There were a lot of obstacles – for example, the authorities considered that my son was stateless – but I ended up working as a paediatrician in a tough area of Santiago. I worked with children who were poor, whose parents had been tortured or disappeared. I started becoming a little bit of an activist. Then Pinochet, the dictator, decided to hold a referendum, and he lost. I cannot tell you how much joy there was at that time - when we began to be free again.

I started working with the Health Ministry, and a little later I became an advisor to an Undersecretary, none of this was very glamorous or exciting, but I felt I was making a difference. But I was always struck by the huge division between the military and ordinary people – they were like two sealed-off countries that couldn't speak the same language, couldn't understand each other. So while I was working at the Health Ministry I decided to learn the Army's language. I began a part-time degree in military strategy, and then I went to the  Inter-American Defence College for a year. And after that the Ministry of Health asked me to be liaison to the Ministry of Defence. It's about seeking out the common language, the communication between very different kinds of people who manage to find the ways in which, when you get right down to it, we are very much the same.

That's it, that's my story. I became Minister for Health, Minister for Defence, and the President of Chile – twice. I had two children and now I have two grandchildren, I was the first Executive Director of an agency called UN Women and I am the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. These are very different jobs, and I could make the story much longer of course.

But my path throughout my life has been a very clear one, if you look at it from the point of view of helping other people, and seeking out a common language - bringing people together and helping them to dialogue and find agreement.

I'm sure your stories will be very different ones. But I hope they, also, will be guided by the universal principles that give our lives meaning. Because time and again, in all these very different circumstances I have told you about, I saw that  human rights-based policies deliver better outcomes for everyone. For people all the way across the social and economic spectrum, and not only that – beyond the borders of the State.

They encourage reconciliation. They prevent grievances, conflicts, inequalities, and suffering and discrimination of all kinds. They build confidence and social harmony. They deepen trust. They build hope.

So to return to the pandemic, I hope what you can take away from this session of the Students' United Nations is a sense that shared solutions, principled solutions, can be achieved, and that they will make the world, and all our societies, better places to live in.

Whether we're talking about new laws, or an agreement on joint action to target a common problem like climate change or COVID-19, policies that are grounded in dialogue, built on inclusion and solidarity, and guided by human rights goals make for more effective and better outcomes.

They have worked in the past – I have seen that in my own life – and they can work in the future – which is your future, a future you will share with billions of other people across the world.

Bishop Desmond Tutu put it very beautifully when he said "I am not an optimist, but I am a prisoner of hope". I know there are many terrible things around us, but I also feel very deeply that progress is possible, and even probable.

Even when we are experiencing many setbacks, people's compassion, their fundamental instinct for goodness and solidarity, prevails.

Now please, I have heard my own voice long enough, it's time for you to speak up.