Addressing the Human Rights Council in Geneva at the start of its first high-level session of the year, the UN chief insisted that any further extension of Israel’s ground operation in the south of Gaza “would not only be terrifying for more than a million Palestinian civilians sheltering there; it would put the final nail in the coffin of our aid programmes”.

Rules of war ignored

The top human rights body also heard the UN chief decry how the “rule of law and the rules of war” were being undermined from Ukraine to Sudan and from Myanmar to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and beyond – a theme echoed by the UN’s top human rights official, Volker Türk, and by President of the UN General Assembly, Dennis Francis.

To respond to these emergencies, and in a call for reasoned and long-term solutions to these conflicts and other serious threats to human rights around the world, UN chief Mr. Guterres emphasised that the Summit of the Future in September would be the ideal opportunity for Member States “to step up and re-commit to working for peace and security rooted in human rights”.

Protection pledge

Mr. Guterres also pledged the global body’s system-wide support to all governments in this endeavour, announcing the launch of the United Nations Agenda for Protection, in partnership with the UN human rights office, OHCHR.

“Under this Agenda, the United Nations, across the full spectrum of our work, will act as one to prevent human rights violations, and to identify and respond to them when they take place,” the Secretary-General said. “That is the Protection Pledge of all United Nations bodies: to do their utmost to protect people.”

Disinformation target

Welcoming the UN chief’s initiative and offering to help advance people’s fundamental rights “in every circumstance, no matter how challenging”, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Türk cautioned that the global body’s work was at serious risk from “continuedattempts to undermine the legitimacy and work of the United Nations and other institutions”.

Mr. Türk explained that these attempts “include disinformation that targets UN humanitarian organizations, UN peacekeepers and my Office. The UN has become a lightning rod for manipulative propaganda and a scapegoat for policy failures”.

This malign influence was “profoundly destructive of the common good, and it callously betrays the many people whose lives rely on it”, insisted the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

General Assembly chief’s alert

Echoing warnings that international humanitarian law and even the UN Charter were coming under increasing threat around the world, the head of the UN General Assembly, Dennis Francis, told the Human Rights Council that it was time for all global citizens to “do our part”.

Today, 75 years after the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – “humanity’s cherished Magna Carta” – conflict, the impact of climate change “including the existential threat of sea-level rise” – had left 300 million people in dire need of humanitarian assistance, some 114 million of them being refugees and other displaced people, he warned.

“We must not simply stand-by as callous observers, less we be seen as complicit in the expanding web of dehumanization…We must do our part,” he said.

Highlighting the crisis in the Middle East, the UN General Assembly President said that the suffering of innocent civilians in Gaza had reached an “unbearable tipping point”.

More than90 per cent of the enclave’s population had been displaced and was now “teetering on the brink of starvation and trapped in the depths of an impending though avoidable public health catastrophe”, Mr. Francis told the forum’s 47 Member States.