Holocaust Memorial Day, which takes place in the UK on 27 January, is an occasion to reflect on how far these principles have been fulfilled. This year’s theme, ‘one day’, evokes the hope that one day, there will exist the checks and balances that were desperately needed when the Holocaust was happening – and during the genocides that have since followed, including in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur. A day when there would be no more oppression. The Genocide Convention was meant to do that. Human rights were meant to do that.
However, the reality is different. Since 2017, more than three million Uyghurs and other Turkic people are held in concentration camps known as ‘re-education centres’ in the Xinjiang region of China, where they are subject to routine torture, sexual abuse, forced labour and forced sterilisation. Across the region, the Chinese government has constructed a system of mass surveillance to curtail the Uyghurs’ religious freedom, erase indigenous cultural practices and forbid political dissent. Families are torn apart, with children separated from their parents and no communication allowed with relatives in exile for fear of retribution.
It is not only the Uyghurs. Millions of individuals fleeing war, oppression and exploitation around the world are denied the protections human rights are designed to provide them. The pandemic has exposed long-existing inequalities that literally determine life or death. People lack access to the fundamental necessities of human existence – food, clothing, housing, medical care, education and employment – that the declaration was designed to guarantee. The protections and ethical principles exist, but the will to apply them is wanting.
When Cassin set out the foundations for the human rights framework as we know it today, he created a legacy. With that legacy comes responsibility: the responsibility to remember what the lowest points of humanity can look like and the responsibility to act to prevent us from reaching them.
We each have a role in fulfilling this responsibility; to speak out, to stand in solidarity and to challenge decision-makers. It is up to governments to take a tougher stand against the Chinese government, through sanctions, for example, or the rest of us to ensure the upcoming Winter Olympics in Beijing will forever be remembered as the #GenocideGames. It is about challenging the hostile environment created by policies that dehumanise and discriminate against the most vulnerable in our society, such as refugees and asylum seekers or victims of slavery and trafficking. And it is about remaking the case for human rights so that the price paid during the Holocaust, and the circumstances that led to it, are never repeated.
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