Statement of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, at the 31st session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, 29 February 2016 

Distinguished Presidents of the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly – and President Lykketoft, we are delighted and honoured to see you with us this morning

Excellencies,
Colleagues, Friends,

I would like first of all to welcome His Excellency Choi Kyong-Lim, who is presiding over his first session of the Council, and to thank the former President, Ambassador Rücker, for his sterling work.

I am honoured to address this Council on the eve of its second decade. This is an anniversary that calls for more than rhetoric: it cries out for action, and decisive and cooperative leadership in defence of vital principles.

Human rights violations are like a signal, the sharp zig-zag lines of a seismograph flashing out warnings of a coming earthquake.  Today, these jagged red lines are shuddering faster and higher.  They signal increasing, and severe, violations of fundamental rights and principles. These shocks are being generated by poor decisions, unprincipled and often criminal actions, and narrow, short-term, over-simplified approaches to complex questions. All now crushing the hopes and lives of countless people. So the compression begins, once again.  This resurgent broad-based malice, irresponsibility and sometimes eye-watering stupidity, altogether acting like steam at high pressure being fed into the closed chamber of world events.  And unless it is released gradually and soon, through wiser policy making – where the interests of all humans override this strengthening pursuit of the narrowest, purely national, or ideological, agenda.  Otherwise - as the reading of human history informs us – its release, when it comes, will be as a colossus of violence and death. 

Mr. President,

When the key drafters, representing States, wrote the UN Charter and drew up the protective fortress of treaties and laws making up our international system, they did not do so because they were idealists only. They did it for security, and because they were pragmatists.  They had experienced global warfare, dispossession and the oppression of imperialism. They had lived “balance-of-power” politics, and its consequences – thrown violently into imbalance as it was by the feral nationalisms and ideologies of the extreme left and right. They knew, from bitter experience, human rights, the respect for them, the defence of them, would not menace national security – but build more durable nations, and contribute (in their words) to “a final peace”. And so, after the cataclysm of global war and the development of nuclear weapons, they created the UN, and wrote international laws, to ward off those threats. 

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