Despite a complicated health situation, the Human Rights Council has preserved the core of its work and started to return to a more usual functioning, noticeably with informal dialogues starting anew, a large part of the work of Christophe Barbey, our representative at the United Nations in Geneva.
Last fall the Center for Global Nonkilling made an important contribution to Universal Periodic Review of Guyana by making a submission and then participating as a speaker in a semi-formal meeting with diplomats: the UPR-Info precessions. The final approval of the review was on Monday 5th of October and things seem to be going in the right direction: you can hear our oral statement here:
Kiribati is a small non-militarised State in the Pacific Region. It is late in ratifying the “world’s life preserving constitution”, but shows good will. Learn more about this beautiful country:
Will Grenada be the first State in the Caribbean Region to definitely abolish the death penalty? We surely ask for it:
Armenia has been a strong support, through the Universal Periodic Review process of the ratification of the Genocide convention. We meant to thank them for that during their own review. The President thought our gratitude to be a bit out of topic and to some extent we admit it as we forgot to mention it was surely a very useful use, by Armenia, of the UPR procedure:
Some States still think they could be fully part of the human community while falling short on genocide prevention. The Center for Global Nonkilling insists on the good of life and on the need for its protection, in small and as in big issues. We sincerely hope Kenya hears us.
We made a strong submission for Lesotho focusing mainly on public peace policies (next time we will highlight these linking them more thoroughly with life issues). Because of the help of Conscience and Peace Tax international (largely speaking: an NGO advocating for money for peace), we could highlight the importance of conflict prevention to save lives and recall the need for life protection in pride and enthusiasm:
Our efforts to promote life at the UN have also made it to snapshots from the High Commissioner for Human Rights of national UPR country reports (we appear at the end of these 1 minute videos):
This one is high on our list, San Marino, first Nonkilling Country:
A severe one for Brunei Darussalam; sadly others have also refused ratifying the genocide convention since:
For Dominica, we were very happy they did ratify the Genocide convention but were quoted for another reason (and someone else spoke of progress on death penalty):
We will shortly return with more CGNK news as we prepare the round of written submissions for the Universal Periodic Review.
Sources: Center for Global Nonkilling
