Geneva: Head of UN rights warned Monday that environmental threats deteriorate conflict throughout the world and will soon be the biggest challenge for human rights.
Michelle Bachelet said climate change, pollution and natural losses have greatly affected the rights throughout the council and said countries consistently failed to take the necessary actions to curb damage.
“The pollution crisis that is interrelated, climate change and biodiversity acts as a multiplier of threats, strengthens conflict, structural tensions and inequality, and forces people to become increasingly vulnerable situations,” Bachelet to the opening of the 48th session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva .
“Because this environmental threat increases, they will form a single biggest challenge for human rights in our era.” The former Chilean president said the threat was already “directly and severely impacted on various rights, including the right to food, water, education, housing, health, development, and even life itself”.
He said environmental damage usually most hurt the most poorest people and nations, because they often have the least capacity to respond.
Bachelet said the last few months had released “extreme climate and murder”, quoting fires in Siberia and California, and floods in China, Germany and Turkey.
He also said the drought could potentially force millions of people to become tribulation, hunger, and displacement.
Bachelet said that overcoming the environmental crisis is “an imperative humanity, imperative human rights, the need for peace and development development.
It can also be done.” He said expenditure to revive the economy after the Covid-19 pandemic could be focused on environmentally friendly projects, but “this is a change that unfortunately not consistently and strongly done”.
He also said that countries have “consistently failed to fund and applying” commitments made under the Paris climate agreement.
“We have to set a higher bar – indeed, our general future depends on him,” said the Head of the UN Rights.
Bachelet said that at the 12-day COP26 climate negotiations at Glasgow, began to begin on October 31, his office would encourage more ambitious rights-based commitments.
Bachelet said that in many regions, human rights defenders are threatened, harassed and killed, often with complete impunity.
He said the economic shift triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic appeared to encourage the increase in the exploitation of mineral resources, forests and soil, with indigenous peoples specifically at risk.
“In Brazil, I was worried about the recent attack on Yanomami members and my desperate by illegal miners at Amazon,” he said.
In the opening of the global opening, Bachelet touched the human rights situation in several countries, including Chad, Central African Republic, Haiti, India, Mali and Tunisia.
In China, he said there was no progress that had been made in his efforts for years to look for “meaningful access” to Xinjiang.
“Meanwhile, my office is completing his assessment of the information available about allegations of serious human rights violations in the region, with the intention of making it public,” he said.
Rights groups believe at least one million Uyghur and most Muslim minorities have been imprisoned in camps in the northwestern region, where China is also accused of being sterilized by women and forcing forced labor.
Beijing strongly denied the allegations and said the training program, a better work and education scheme had helped infect extremism in the region.