December 12, 2011
UNPO Presidency Marks Human Rights Day with Call for Respect for International Norms and Deeper Consultation of Peoples
The Hague, 10 December 2011 – At the close of a year in which the rights of indigenous, marginalized, nations and peoples continue to be violated in the world affecting members of UNPO, it is therefore time to reflect on the both the challenges facing these peoples and their efforts to lift up their situation against tremendous obstacles.
Around the world, asylum seekers from discriminated communities have been returned to the regimes they have fled from prosecution. On return they risk becoming victims of judicial processes that are opaque, detention conditions that contravene international norms, and face little or no opportunity to appeal the sentences leveled against them. The UNPO expresses its solidarity with those activists around the world that presented these cases to the United Nations (UN), European Union (EU), and their national governments in a growing movement to ensure the 1951 Refugee Convention retains its relevance.
Similarly, lack of consultation of the people living closest to the land continues at great cost as lakes become deserts, the air thick with their sand while forests are cleared and knowledge of their treasures is lost forever. Traditional ways of life that have sustained communities in some of the most beautiful and fragile environments are being extinguished and replaced by conurbations that smother the land and the traditional communities forced to live in them.
Against this backdrop, the UNPO Presidency calls upon the international community to renew its commitments to protect the rights of peoples all over the globe. It urges those struggling for their legitimate rights to stand in nonviolent solidarity and to ensure that together the progress made in 2011 can be built upon in the knowledge that the rights of people are inalienable in a world increasingly interconnected and within which oppression finds it harder to hide than ever.
