UN and international community must focus on minorities to address global crises and conflict prevention, UN expert warns

NEW YORK (31 October 2023) – The United Nations and the international community have failed to focus efforts where they are most needed: on preventing conflict and ensuring equal protection of the human rights of marginalised minorities in a world of rising nationalism, xenophobia and prejudice, a UN expert told the General Assembly, warning that this has led to growing global instability, humanitarian crises and conflict.

“The world is a darker, more dangerous and unstable place than it has ever been for almost a century,” said Fernand de Varennes, the UN Special Rapporteur on minority issues.

“We now have more violent conflicts than at any time since the end of the Second World War,” de Varennes said. “Most of these are internal conflicts, and involve ethnic, religious or linguistic grievances from minorities or indigenous peoples. This has also been the main driving force behind the largest number of displaced people in human history, a staggering 110 million individuals displaced worldwide,” he said.

The Special Rapporteur highlighted the rise of hate speech, hate crimes, and even calls to genocide, and new record levels of antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Black and anti-Asian, xenophobia and intolerance, with social media becoming platforms for the spread of dehumanising language usually targeting minorities, often minority women, even normalising violence against them.

He called for the UN to address the ‘inaction and negligence’ in relation to the protection of the rights of minorities when compared to the initiatives provided to other vulnerable groups, to concentrate efforts on conflict prevention rather than on conflict resolution with a focus on internal conflicts which are driving the current explosion of conflicts worldwide, to relaunch and reinvigorate the 2013 guidance note of the Secretary-General on racial discrimination and protection of minorities for the mainstreaming and integration of minority rights in all United Nations pillars and activities, and the integration of minority rights into the work of the United Nations system, and create a permanent forum for minorities as well as begin work on a global treaty on the protection of their rights.

“It is urgent to leave no one behind where it is most needed, and for the United Nations to put into practice the noble principle that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. In the long run, there can be no peace and stability without justice,” de Varennes said.