United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk launched a four-week session of the UN's Human Rights Council with a call for global leadership to avert a "dystopian future," invoking urgent warnings about the treatment of women in Taliban-led Afghanistan and Ukrainians under near-constant Russian attack.
Midway through his four-year mandate as the UN's leading voice on human rights, Turk said the world was "at a fork in the road."
The world faces a choice between continuing into "a treacherous 'new normal'" that fosters "sleepwalk[ing] into a dystopian future" or "wak[ing] up and turn[ing] things around for the better, for humanity and the planet," he said.
Turk cited "endless, vicious military escalation and increasingly horrifying, technologically 'advanced' methods of warfare, control, and repression."
He also cited indifference to inequalities between and within countries, a disinformation "free-for-all," the twisting of national sovereignty "to shroud -- or excuse -- horrific violations," and the discrediting of multilateral institutions or trying to "rewrite the international rules."
Turk said human rights aren't in crisis, "but political leadership needed to make them a reality is."
"At their most extreme, for example in Afghanistan, despicable laws and policies are effectively erasing women from public life," Turk said in reference to the Taliban-led government that has led that country since a U.S.-led international coalition withdrew in mid-2021.
The Taliban seized power promising more moderate policies than when the hard-line fundamentalist group ruled the country some two decades earlier, but its leaders have since doubled down on the recreation of a totalitarian clerical regime, especially with regard to women, who have effectively been denied any public role in society.
Afghan women have been banned from working in many sectors and are barred from recreation and leisure activities such as visiting public parks and public baths, and also face severe restrictions on where and how they can appear in public.
Turk's concerns on Afghanistan were echoed in a warning ahead of the session by a Human Rights Watch (HRW) statement saying the UN Human Rights Council "should urgently create an independent body to pursue accountability for all those responsible for serious abuses -- past and present -- in Afghanistan."
HRW said the human rights and humanitarian reality there had "gravely spiraled downward" since August 2021.
Richard Bennett, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan, said in his report ahead of the 57th session of the Human Rights Council that women and girls had been victim to ever-greater restrictions under the Taliban.
In his wide-ranging speech, Turk also talked about horrific conditions for millions of Ukrainians and a region of Russia recently occupied by Ukraine as Russia's full-scale invasion grinds through its third year.
"In Ukraine, civilians are trapped in cycles of terror, through ongoing attacks by the Russian Federation striking civilian facilities like hospitals, schools, and supermarkets, and repeated waves of targeting of energy infrastructure leading to country-wide blackouts," Turk said. "I fear for Ukrainians this coming winter."
He also cited the "horrific" attacks in Israel by the U.S.- and EU-designated terrorist organization Hamas that killed more than 1,200 people and injured many more, and the subsequent deaths of more than 40,000 Palestinians at the hands of Israeli forces.