The Human Rights Council has mandated OHCHR to organize an expert workshop

To discuss the role and contribution of civil society organizations, academia, national human rights institutions and other relevant stakeholders in the prevention of human rights abuses

21 February 2018

Geneva, Palais Wilson
(ground floor conference room)
from 10:00 am to 10:30 am

It is my great privilege to join my colleagues in welcoming you to this important expert workshop. 

Thank you for joining us today to help take the fullest benefit of the Human Rights Council’s decision to focus us on the role and contribution of civil society organizations, academia, national human rights institutions and other relevant stakeholders in the prevention of human rights abuses.

The diverse expertise and experience that you bring, the range of perspectives you offer and the spread of discipline areas from which you draw your wisdom - means that we have here the makings of a rich and challenging discussion that will offer back to the HRC a critical contribution at a critical time on a critical matter.

The HRC’s resolution seeks to shine light on the distinct, irreplaceable but often underestimated, and as often misrepresented, role that civil society, NHRIs and other civilian actors play in prevention of human rights abuses and more.

Orthodox models of conflict prevention are rooted in militarization and, more recently, securitization.  On their own, these cures risk serious exacerbation of the original complaint.  And with intra state conflict on the rise, the failures of over reliance on these approaches are daily apparent across our news outlets. 

Non-militarized, long-term solutions founded on human rights, good governance and sustainable inclusive development and delivered much earlier are the most effective preventers of every things we would wish to prevent.

In this more holistic approach, civil society is key.  However, here too there is no silver bullet. 

Civil society is home too for nativist and populist movements.  Movements against LGBTI persons, for gun ownership, in promotion of xenophobia demonstrate the broad-spectrum appeal of civil society action but the challenge too of framing that action so that it bends towards support of all human rights for all and away from driving the fragmentations and separations that drive the very abuses we seek to prevent.

Nonetheless, as the Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence, Pablo de Greiff reminds us, the empirical evidence suggests a robust positive correlation exists between a strong and autonomous civil society and upward trends for human rights.  The more open, inclusive, pluralistic and free is civil society, the more likely the surrounding society is peaceful, prosperous and progressive.

While the State bears the primary responsibility to protect their populations from abuse, engagement in the prevention project must extend far beyond state agents alone.  Civil society, NHRIs, private actors play critical roles to play, whether those are recognized or not.

When civil society space contracts, when it is encroached upon unduly, when we fail to invest in it, then damage to human freedom and creativity is the price, erosion of human dignity is the cost and conflict more likely the outcome. In this effort civil society is not merely a means but it is the end.

Erosions of freedom of expression, assembly and association are warning signs of broader repressive intent as are attacks on freedom of movement, for example, of human rights defenders, of political opponents, of lawyers and of journalists.  The health of civil society is thus a litmus test for peace.  

A protective, inclusive and enabling environment for civil society - in law and practice - is a sure and sturdy route to prevention particularly when paved too with strong and independent NHRIs; with active participation by women and young people; with safe and open access to international human rights bodies; and with a strong and dynamic community of defenders.⁠

Distinguished participants,

To do prevention better we must get prevention right.  To get it right, we must put people at the heart of prevention and human rights at the heart of people.  In this, our focus must include, but extend, beyond civil and political rights. Deepening inequalities and violations of economic, social and cultural rights are the toxic roots of virtually all instability and violence the world over.

The good news ironically is that the man-made crises of conflict and hatred are human stoppable.  Different choices can be made. Different policies instigated.  Different concrete action taken that helps lift communities out of a downwards spiral towards atrocity and on towards reciprocity of tolerance, respect, inclusion. 

Atrocity is not some inevitable fate of humankind, but it does demand of us our best efforts to prevent it.  Prevention of atrocity crimes is immensely less costly than dealing with their consequences – morally, socially, economically

Friends,

There being some confusion across the system as to what falls within the term prevention, it may be worth considering the ways in which other discipline areas have framed up holistic approaches to prevention.

Public health professionals, for example, use the idea of different levels of prevention as the building blocks of a holistic approach. 

Primary prevention efforts address root causes, stopping the problem before it even occurs and making occurrence less likely.

Secondary prevention focuses on rapid response to the earliest signs, seeking to minimize early impacts and taking necessary measures to make recovery sustainable and escalation improbable. 

Tertiary prevention aims to minimise harm once the problem is in full flight.

Seeking to prevent terminal lung cancer, primary prevention restricts the tobacco industry, places prohibitive taxes on cigarettes, and introduces measures to prevent smoking in public.  Secondary prevention is aimed at dissuading new smokers from continuing, while offering support for all smokers to stop sooner for longer.  Tertiary prevention focuses on survival treatments for those suffering smoking induced disease and disability. 

Borrowing core aspects of this typology, it seems clear that efforts towards prevention of human rights abuses have been caught up primarily in tertiary and late secondary responses, with far too little effort globally focused on primary prevention of the root causes including the socioeconomic drivers of injustice. 

From a human rights standpoint, the prevention discourse thus cannot be a question only of mainstreaming human rights into peace and security agenda but rather makes arguably even more urgent the comprehensive mainstreaming of human rights into the inclusive development agenda – and there too we have a struggle that we are yet to win.

Let us not forget that in our tool kit we what the 2030 agenda provides.  If implemented as a rights-encompassing agenda, the Sustainable Development Goals can help seek out and up root the deeper causes of insecurity by reducing inequalities and eliminating pervasive discrimination.
In our efforts to build up this more holistic framework approach to prevention – inspiration can be found in the guidelines and standards developed by the Human Rights Council and the recommendations of other human rights mechanisms, such as those of the UPR – which are important tools but in dire need of greater effort for their implementation.

Distinguished participants,

It seems to me therefore that we know why prevention matters, thanks to human rights we know what needs to be done, with the SDGs we arguably know how it to do it – but through this workshop you have the opportunity to help tackle the even more critical and much more often neglected issue of who – who do we need to engage, mobilize and support to get it done.

This question of “who” brings us to that which in modern public health approaches has been identified as a fourth or  additional tier to prevention – one that digs even deeper into root causes than does the classical first tier of primary prevention. 

Referred to as primordial prevention, this dimension focuses preventative efforts more squarely on establishing and maintaining conditions that minimize future threats and maximize environmental, economic, social and behavioral conditions, cultural patterns that are antithetical to that which is being prevented – in our case antithetical to human rights erosion over the loner term.

The question of “who” is of primordial importance in prevention efforts today and tomorrow.  And it leads beyond the call for broad engagement of civil society to a pressing, and I think still largely ignored, imperative to address the new demographics of despair. 

The imperative for this, which underscored in the Security Council’s “Youth Peace and Security” resolution, is found in the world’s youth population - the largest in human history - the healthiest, most educated, best connected – but most concentrated where inequality is at its deepest; poverty at its gravest and conflict at its worst.  The median age of South Sudan? 17.  The median age of Yemen? 18.5.  The median age of Iraq? 21.  The median age of Germany? Of Japan? 47.

Subjected to insecurity.  On the front lines of conflict. Populating the roads of escape. Locked in the backrooms of neglect. Kept outside the rooms in which decisions affecting them are made.  Poverty, despair, hopelessness is young, young, young.  Relative privilege, and the fear of its dilution, of its loss, is older and ageing. 

This is a “youthquake” - selected by Oxford Dictionaries as the 2017’s word of the year.  If we do not engage and address sustain this reality in more effective and interconnected ways, win the trust confidence and conviction of young people, then prevention efforts will fail on a scale that we have yet to fathom.

Friends,

The Secretary-General has stressed that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is “perhaps the best prevention tool we have”.  In this 70th anniversary year of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we must once again stand up for those principles, celebrating what these last seven decades of universal and indivisible rights have enabled and recommitting to realization of its fuller potential to prevent hatred, insecurity, violence and conflict and build instead inclusive sustainable peace.

Thank you all for your attention and I wish you a very successful dialogue over the next two days.