HRC 57: AWID, BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights,SRI, ILGA World, FORUM-ASIA Statement to General Debate on Item 8
This is a joint statement.1
The United Nations and its auxiliary bodies were created by the international community (states) as a framework for the prevention and redress of human rights violations and crimes committed by states reaffirmed by the VDPA. A system of checks and balances that was intended to protect vulnerable and marginalized groups from persecution, discrimination and bodily harm.
Yet time and again this system has failed to prevent and stop genocide. It has failed to protect people from forced displacement and transfer, and to ensure reparations. It has allowed its agencies and staff to be attacked and killed, facilities targeted and destroyed, services and aid obstructed.
It imposed partition when it had no authority to do so.
It has granted legitimacy where it does not exist and allowed the inalienable rights of peoples to self-determination to be trampled. It has allowed the rights to life, the right to choice, the right to live free from discrimination and persecution to be obliterated.
It has catered to the political will and agenda of powerful member states, posturing balanced approaches while permitting apartheid and colonial regimes to run their course.
A system of checks and balances is only as good as its mechanisms of accountability are activated and utilized in an accurate and unbiased way. If these mechanisms are applied at the will and for the benefit of powerful colonial states and regimes to entrench the status quo, then they will fail time and again to serve their purpose: to prevent violations and crimes and protect the unprotected.
This council must act now to prevent itself from collapsing under the weight of its own compromise and complicity. We call on all states to end colonial domination and oppression, discrimination and persecution - we ask the states, if you can't hold genocidal regimes to account, how can we expect anyone else to adhere to accountability mechanisms.
1 Association for women’s rights in development (AWID), BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights , Sexual Rights Initiative (SRI), ILGA World, Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development (FORUM-ASIA)