Opening Statement by Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights

Colleagues, Friends,

GENEVA (4 March 2016) - It is an honor to be here this evening. The OHCHR values enormously its long standing partnership with this Festival and joins in the thanks offered to the organizers, the City of Geneva and you for making this an event of such standing.

But we gather here together in times of trouble. The loudest messages about the state of our world are bleak indeed.   The human cost of war - lives lost, people displaced and societies obliterated - is on a scale almost unfathomable.  Where until but a few years ago violence was on the decrease, we know witness a devastating reality that in this decade conflict has killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced from their homes and livelihood’s more than 60 million people – while acts of terror and of hate – near and afar – drive fear into hearts where once there was compassion. The planet warms at rates unprecedented, washing away every day lives and drying out everyday dignity exhausting mineral and vegetable, species and habitat.

The invitation of such a time is not to festivals of fear or despair, but to gatherings in affirmation of action and of hope.  Despite the toxic calls emanating from some political leaders to the contrary, this is not an era for retreat into private, security reinforced, spaces or into narrow mindsets of individual interests alone. 

Today’s harsh realities are a rallying cry instead to festivals of diversity, pluralism, respect, tolerance and hope. To communal gatherings in public spaces and places such as that which brings here tonight.

Only when we are gathered together in such shared spaces can we more fully recall –– that most precious principle to which human rights puts words and standards – that we are born equal.  Just look around us – and look too upon the silver screens of this festival - at this rich, quixotic diversity of who we are, of the myriad stories that are our different life journeys and yet of the evidence too that in all this difference we are also and still the same.

Ladies and gentlemen, Flaubert said that: Of all lies, art is the least untrue¹.  In an era too of poisonous propaganda, the power and responsibility of artistic expression - itself an exercise of human rights – should not be underestimated. The films that this festival gathers demonstrate exactly that zooming in closely – to give the least “untrue” accounts of the human suffering that disregard for human rights generates and they point us towards their solution - greater justice, greater equality, greater freedom, greater voice.

Yet here too a note of caution – our gaze – in such a place as this must not be the gaze of unconscious privilege.  The great photographer and philosopher Susan Sontag cautioned that images may confront – transfix but they also “anesthetize".  She suggested that perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering are those who could do something to alleviate it ... or those who could learn from it.  The rest of us are but voyeurs.  True pornography in that sense then is to gaze upon images of suffering and then do nothing about that which you have seen.  The making of this into a festival of action thus is not in the hands of the film maker or the organizer but in those of us who choose not made hereby into mere voyeurs.