Brussels, April 2 (IANS/WAM): UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has declared that defending human rights is a global responsibility, and called on all governments to renew their commitment to vigilance and political will to prevent any mass atrocities from ever occurring again.
"We pay tribute to the memory of victims through remembrance and reflection. But it is perhaps through our prevention and protection efforts that we honour them even more," the UN chief said while addressing the International Conference on Genocide Prevention in Brussels Tuesday.
In his speech, Ban commended the progress that has been made in holding accountable genocide perpetrators, citing the establishment of special international criminal tribunals for Rwanda, former Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone and Cambodia as "breakthroughs against impunity" and proof that "the rule of law keeps gaining ground".
He also drew attention to some of the international community’s past failures in preventing genocide, citing the UN Security Council's decision to withdraw the UN peacekeeping operation in Rwanda 20 years ago, "thereby taking away the sorely needed international ‘eyes and ears’ on the ground".
"The UN was also deeply tarnished by its actions and inactions at Srebrenica," he added, stressing that the organisation has been working hard "to draw on the lessons of those failures".
"My Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, Adama Dieng, and my Special Adviser on the Responsibility to Protect, Jennifer Welsh, scan the world for signs of the precursors of genocide and atrocity crimes, sound the alarm when necessary and work with countries and regions to enhance prevention," Ban explained. "They continue our efforts to operationalise this principle, a milestone on its adoption almost a decade ago."
The UN chief described how the organisation has put prevention at the forefront of its efforts, notably through the ‘Rights Up Front’ exercise.
"Rights Up Front aims to improve prevention through an intense and early focus on human rights violations," he said, adding that this approach was drawn from the case of Sri Lanka and that "it obliges those within the organisation to be frank in telling member states what they need to hear, rather than what they might want to hear, about serious violations and emerging crisis situations".
"The Rights up Front approach has been on display in recent months in South Sudan, where the United Nations opened the gates of its peacekeeping installations, offering shelter to people fleeing violence," Ban said.
Stating that "20 years ago, such steps would have been unthinkable," the secretary-general noted that today they were taken "as a deliberate matter of policy - a lesson of Rwanda made real".