Furniture piled up on a settee in a flooded home in Larissa, central Greece on September 11, 2023.
| Photo Credit: AFP
Climate change is sparking human rights emergencies in quite a few nations, the UN rights chief stated on Monday, stressing the necessity to battle the impunity of those that “plunder our environment”.
Speaking earlier than the United Nations Human Rights Council, Volker Turk pointed to latest examples of the “environmental horror that is our global planetary crisis”.
He described visiting Basra, Iraq, the place date palms as soon as lined canals, however now “drought, searing heat, extreme pollution and fast-depleting supplies of fresh water are creating barren landscapes of rubble and dust”.
“This spiralling damage is a human rights emergency for Iraq, and many other countries,” he stated in his deal with opening the 54th council session in Geneva.
“Climate change is pushing millions of people into famine. It is destroying hopes, opportunities, homes and lives. In recent months, urgent warnings have become lethal realities again and again all around the world,” Mr. Turk stated.
“We do not need more warnings. The dystopian future is already here. We need urgent action now.”
Mr. Turk was talking after the G-20 on the weekend did not decide to a phase-out of fossil fuels, one thing he stated was desperately wanted.
At a time when the ravages of local weather change are forcing increasingly folks to depart their houses, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights stated he was “shocked by the nonchalance” seen in direction of surging numbers of migrant deaths.
“It is evident that far more migrants and refugees are dying, unnoticed,” he stated, pointing to the greater than “2,300 people reported dead or missing in the Mediterranean this year, including the loss of more than 600 lives in a single shipwreck off Greece in June.”
He additionally highlighted migrant deaths within the English Channel, the Bay of Bengal, within the Caribbean, alongside the U.S.-Mexican border, and on the Saudi border, the place he stated his “office is seeking urgent clarification about allegations of killings and mistreatment”.
The UN rights chief additionally highlighted a variety of different regarding conditions around the globe, together with in Russia, Pakistan and the Palestinian territory.
On China, he reiterated issues raised in a report by his workplace a 12 months in the past in regards to the scenario within the far-western Xinjiang area, which cited attainable crimes towards humanity towards Uyghurs and different Muslim minorities.
“As my Office highlighted a year ago, the concerns in the Xinjiang … requires strong remedial action by the authorities,” Turk stated Monday, additionally voicing concern at “continued detention of human rights advocates”.
Mr. Turk additionally spoke in regards to the scenario in Lebanon, decrying a complete lack of accountability for the 2020 Beirut port blast, that killed greater than 220 folks, urging “an international fact-finding mission to look into human rights violations related to this tragedy.”
And he talked about the scenario in Iran, one 12 months after the loss of life of Mahsa Amini in custody after her arrest for allegedly breaching the strict costume code for ladies.
Mr. Turk voiced concern at a invoice that may impose harsher penalties for breaching the costume code, and “renewed deployment of the morality police.”
Climate change and environmental degradation performed a task in quite a few the rights conditions he talked about, together with in Africa’s Sahel area.
Mr. Turk insisted on the necessity to “counter the impunity of people and businesses who severely plunder our environment”, welcoming a proposal to recognise “ecocide” as a global crime.
Amid the towering issues dealing with the world, Mr. Turk decried “politics of deception”.
“Helped by new technologies, lies and disinformation are mass-produced to sow chaos, to confuse, and ultimately to deny reality and ensure no action will be taken that could endanger the interests of entrenched elites,” he stated.
“The most apparent case of this is climate change.”
Source: www.thehindu.com
