Women's rights

Statement by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein ahead of the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, 27 January 2017, Geneva This painful day of remembrance for the victims of the Holocaust forces us to contemplate the horrors to which bigotry, racism and discrimination ultimately lead. The sadistic brutality of the atrocities inflicted by the Nazi regime on Jews, Roma, Slavs, disabled people, political dissidents, homosexuals and others was nourished by layer upon layer of propaganda, falsifications and incitement to hatred. They were denigrated and smeared; one after another, their rights were refused, and finally, even their humanity was denied. 'It happened, therefore it can happen again,' wrote Primo Levi, who endured and survived the concentration camp at Auschwitz Birkenau. As we honour the victims of the Holocaust, we must also acknowledge the need to prevent the recurrence of anti-Semitism and a...

​The men in the room stared at Arnaud Royer in expectation. The Deputy of the UN Peacekeeping Mission’s Human Rights and Protection Division (HRPD) in Mali had just been asked what good are human rights for them. The men were members of an armed separatist group in the town of Ber, a small place bordering the desert in northern Mali. They formed one of the many extremist groups that have clashed with government forces in the north of the country. The men sat in the concrete room, bare, save a desk, some old wooden benches and a battered metal table. They wore combat fatigues and turbans to keep out the ubiquitous dust. Many were armed with rifles. Royer was armed only with his phone. This he held aloft. Earlier that day he had made a phone call to the Human Rights Division Office in Bamako. With that phone call he found out not only where some of the fighters’ relatives were being held by Government forces, but also that the conditions of their detention were deemed to be adequ...

​​​“As a religious minority in Iraq, Yazidis are not accepted and not protected. What is happening to my community is a human rights crisis,” said Erivan Mahdi, 24, a Yazidi woman working in a camp in Iraq’s Kurdistan region that is sheltering displaced Yazidis who have fled attacks by the Islamic State (ISIS). Yazidis are a religious community of some 400,000 people who live in the Sinjar region of northern Iraq. ISIS militants attacked Sinjar in 2014, killing thousands of Yazidi men and taking thousands of women captive. A UN investigation in June 2016 denounced the atrocities as genocide and said ISIS has continued targeting Yazidis since 2014 with an aim to “erase their identity.” The attacks have driven Yazidi communities into camps for internally displaced people (IDPs). Mahdi works with International Volunteers Organization in IDP camps for Yazidi women who have escaped from ISIS captivity, families who have been divided and children who have lost their parents. “There a...