The
Guardian, 11
December 2018:
As those who lived
through two world wars die out, taking with them real memories of past
atrocities, the world is back on a path to self-destruction, a leading
authority on torture has warned.
Human rights are
facing a “worrying backlash” from a global community that has failed to “learn
the lesson” of the past.
Speaking exclusively to
the Guardian, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer,
said the global community had become “complacent” in the face of injustice
because the world no longer understood why human rights should be protected or
what the world would look like without them.
“I don’t think it’s a
coincidence that 70 years after world war two, when the last witnesses of past
atrocities are dying away, we start to see human rights being questioned on a
broad scale,” said Melzer, a Swiss law professor who assumed the UN post in
2016.
“The generation that had
the answer is almost gone. They left behind the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights for us, but it is as if its message is no longer understood, and it
looks like we will have to learn the same lesson the hard way again.”
Melzer’s comments mark
the 70th anniversary of the declaration in a week when world
leaders are in an uproar over global migration flows, with numerous
countries backing out of a UN compact in Marrakech seeking to make migration a
universal right.
Melzer pointed to the
grave human rights violations occurring in key migration routes as proof that
the global community now considers human rights a “luxury” instead of a right….
The first major
dismantling of human rights began after 9/11, said Melzer, who worked for the
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) at the time. He said that the
“global war on terror” saw the use of torture increasingly tolerated in public
opinion as well as in mainstream entertainment….
The global erosion of
human rights is just
one crisis among many, said Melzer, from migration and the environment to
financial instability, energy, poverty and cyber security. Rather than provide
solutions to these problems, however, world leaders are instead “promoting
regressive policies focused on national interests and decrying human rights as
a threat to national sovereignty and security”.
Melzer added: “We must
understand that, in a world full of globalised challenges, human rights are the
very basis for our safety, stability and prosperity, and that any significant
erosion of these rights will cause the collapse of our modern civilisation.
