Women's rights

​​​​Rokhaya Diallo was born and raised in Paris, France, from Senegalese parents. For a long time, she thought of herself as a French person but at some point people started looking at her as if she was a foreigner. It was at that moment that she started to wonder why people would not acknowledge her as a French native. “It was obviously because of the colour of my skin,” she said. “I noticed that most images of France shared from France did not include people like me.” Diallo thought it was time to challenge those misconceptions and display French society as a multicultural and multi-faith country. Her public activism started in 2006 when she founded an anti-racist association called Les indivisibles (The Undividable) which aimed at addressing racism in media discourse. Ten years on, Diallo notices little change. In a discussion at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva when the international community commemorated the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discriminat...

Commemoration of the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade Opening Statement by Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Geneva, 16 March 2017 Director-General, Excellencies, Colleagues and Friends, Today, we honour the memory of the millions of victims of slavery. In particular, the Transatlantic slave trade, over the course of more than four centuries, abducted more than 15 million people from their homes across Africa and transported them by force to the Americas, where they were bought and sold, exploited and frequently killed. We commemorate the suffering of those countless millions of men, women and children. We celebrate the heroes who opposed, and triumphed over, this massive crime against humanity. And we renew our pledge to ensure that no human being is treated as a commodity.  This commemorative day also presents the opportunity to examine the scars created by slavery on...

​​​​Sokhna Diara Diouf is 15 years old. She is a member of the Citizenship and Human Rights Club of the CEM les Martyrs school of Thiaroye, on the outskirts of Dakar, Senegal. The Regional Office for West Africa of the UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR-WARO) has been supporting that Club since 2014 in the framework of its human rights education activities. Every Thursday, Sokhna and other students in her class, girls and boys – although she admits that the girls are more numerous – participate in the club’s meetings to choose the topic that will be the focus of the debate on citizenship and human rights the following Thursday. This time, the theme is schooling, keeping girls in school and marriage. What influences the choice of themes are the students’ challenges in everyday life. They choose a theme that will enable them to discuss human rights while also applying them to problems they encounter daily. Thus, the issue of girls' school attendance and keeping them in school freq...