31st session of the Human Rights Council
Mr. President,
More than a half century ago, UN Watch founder Morris Abram was a leading advocate in the American civil rights movement led by Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King. He also served here, as a United Nations expert against discrimination.
It was Mr. Abram who won the 1963 U.S. Supreme Court case that recognized African-American voting rights, under the principle of “one person, one vote,” and who went on to head the United Negro College Fund.
In 1993, guided by the same vision of human rights and equality, Morris Abram founded UN Watch. Today, the fight against bigotry remains at the core of our mission.
In our view, a society that believes in liberal democracy—in the values of human rights, equality and freedom—is a society that gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.
Mr. President,
It is with this legacy, and with these principles, that UN Watch urges the United Nations to take responsibility to combat the worst form of racism: genocide.
Yesterday Secretary John Kerry recognized that ISIS is “responsible for genocide against groups in areas under its control, including Yezidis, Christians, and Shia Muslims.”
ISIS has captured and enslaved thousands of Yezidi women and girls – selling them at auction, raping them at will, and destroying the communities in which they had lived for countless generations.
To help mobilize world attention for these victims of genocide and crimes against humanity, UN Watch and 20 others NGOS recently gave their annual Geneva Summit Women’s Rights Award to two heroes: Iraqi MP Vian Dakhil, who speaks out for the Yazidi victims, together with Dr. Jan Kizilhan, a German psychologist who is treating many of the most severe cases of Yazidi women victimized by ISIS.
Mr. President, we ask the panel: If indeed genocide is happening, why does this UN Human Rights Council session have no resolutions, urgent debates, or commissions of inquiry? Who will address the plight of these suffering victims?
I thank you, Mr. President.
