The UN right chief said on Thursday that his office would need$ 500 million in addition to its regular resources to address the world’s largest rights crisis this year.
” Lifestyles are at stake if we don’t engage in individual right”, Volker Turk said as he launched his company’s 2025 appeal.
He addressed the crucial work his staff did at the UN in Geneva when he spoke to country representatives there and said that “in 2025, we expect no let-up in significant challenges to people privileges.”
Animal rights must be one of the major objectives in this divided and polarized world, he said.
Turk claimed that his company had raised the alarm in 2024 over serious crimes and abuses committed across a long range of locations, including Sudan, Ukraine, and Myanmar.
The UN high commissioner for human rights claimed that his 2, 000 employees, who work in 92 different nations, had conducted virtually 11, 000 people right monitoring expeditions and had observed almost 1, 000 tests.
The office’s advocacy last year had contributed to the release of around 3, 145 arbitrarily detained people, he said.
Its staff had also documented some 15, 000 situations of rights violations, supported more than 10, 000 survivors of contemporary forms of slavery and more than 49, 000 survivors of torture and their families, he added.
Turk claimed that in order to carry out its work in 2025, his office would need$ 500 million in addition to the funds it would receive through the regular budget.
It requested the same sum last year, but he claimed it only received$ 269 million of that sum, he said.
That was “four percent less than in 2023,” he said, adding that the office had been forced to” spend our reserves in order to make it through the year.”
During the event on Thursday, a number of nations expressing their support for the UN rights office and vowed to keep funding it.
Not one of them was the United States, which has raised questions about recent decisions that might affect UN agency funding.
President Donald Trump declared last week that, pending a review, the United States would temporarily freeze almost all foreign aid once it was formally recognized as the world’s largest donor in terms of dollars.
In addition to its contribution to the regular UN budget, Washington provided$ 36 million in voluntary support to the UN rights office last year.
We do not know yet whether the US will continue to support its funding plans for 2025, but UN rights office spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani told AFP on Thursday.” But we do of course remain hopeful that the US will continue to support us.”
