53minutes.
Human Rights: An Endless Battle
Synopsis
We thought we were going to attend a UN meeting and we witnessed a racist hate fest instead.
Anti-Semitic slogans, flyers praising Hitler to come back from the dead, fundamentalist propaganda... These are the images that have haunted many NGOs since the Durban Conference took place in 2001. It happened a week before 9/11... As the United States waged war against terrorism and deserted UN regulations, Asian and African states took hold of the majority in the brand new Human Rights Council created in 2006.
For the first time, a documentary tells what happens in the UN premises in Geneva. We are trying to understand what became of the 1948 universal declaration on Human Rights. What we discovered seems very far from the miraculous consensus orchestrated by Eleanor Roosevelt 60 years ago. Nowadays, the Council hosts a direct confrontation where dictatorships and authoritarian states give lessons to the few democracies present in the Assembly. As Robert Badinter - the father of death penalty abolition in France - puts it "the question of human rights once more became an ideological battlefield". This is a battle where words can be crushing weapons.
Should we forbid the defamation of religions in order to combat racism at an international level? Or does it constitute a regression when it hides discriminations made in the name of religion in certain countries? This is a very sensitive issue on the eve of Durban 2 and many American and European countries threaten to boycott the process...
Available Versions
Audio
French, German, English
Subtitle
French, German, English
Transcription
French
German
English
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