Human rights are central to COVID-19 recovery efforts: UN

NEW YORK: The International Human Rights Day is being observed on Thursday to raise awareness about human equality, dignity and justice.

This year the day is being celebrated under the theme ‘Recover Better-Stand up for Human Rights’ with an aim to push the international community for transformative action in a post COVID-19 world where human rights must be at the center of the recovery efforts.

This year’s theme relates to the COVID-19 pandemic and focuses on the need to build back better by ensuring human rights are central to recovery efforts.

“We will reach our common global goals only if we are able to create equal opportunities for all, address the failures exposed and exploited by COVID-19, and apply human rights standards to tackle entrenched, systematic, and intergenerational inequalities, exclusion and discrimination,” said a statement by the United Nations.

Thee day is an opportunity to reaffirm the importance of human rights in re-building the world we want, the need for global solidarity as well as our interconnectedness and shared humanity.

It said that human rights must be at the centre of the post COVID-19 world. The crisis has been fuelled by deepening poverty, rising inequalities, structural and entrenched discrimination and other gaps in human rights protection. Only measures to close these gaps and advance human rights can ensure we fully recover and build back a world that is better, more resilient, just, and sustainable, it added.

The UN called on ending discrimination of any kind as structural discrimination and racism have fuelled the COVID-19 crisis. Equality and non-discrimination are core requirements for a post-COVID world. It called on addressing inequalities to recover from the crisis by promoting and protecting economic, social, and cultural rights, and said a new social contract is needed for a new era.

The UN has encouraged participation and solidarity and said individuals, governments, civil society and grass-roots communities and private sector has a role in building a post-COVID world that is better for present and future generations.

It said that there is a need to ensure the voices of the most affected and vulnerable inform the recovery efforts. Furthermore, the UN has called on promoting sustainable for people and the planet.

The day marks the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations in 1948. The UDHR is a milestone document that proclaims the inalienable rights which everyone is entitled as a human being – regardless of race, colour, religion, sex, language, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.