We, the undersigned organizations, with support of more than 7200 organization in the World, urge the Member States of the HRC to pass a strong resolution at the upcoming 49th Session, affirming an international commitment to protect human rights and justice in Sri Lanka, with a particular focus on Tamils victims of Genocide in Sri Lanka.

For many years, Montenegro has expressed its firm intention to become part of the European Union. To become an EU member state, Montenegro will have to implement multiple reforms, fight against corruption, respect human rights and eradicate double standards in the application of legal norms, including in extradition cases.

The challenges from lived experiences came very early to me, the moment I decided to work as an activist for the upliftment of the vulnerable sections of the population. On the one hand, my appointment as a Mayor in Wardak province (which is among the most conservative regions in Afghanistan) was lauded as a significant step in the democratically elected government’s commitment towards women empowerment. At the same time, my mayorship was the beginning of direct confrontation with the country’s conservative forces and the Taliban. In the last two years, I survived three assassination attempts and lost my father and numerous friends, and so many loved ones to the Taliban assassins.

This article states that ‘an act willfully committed by a citizen of Ukraine in the detriment of sovereignty, territorial integrity and inviolability, defense capability, and state, economic or information security of Ukraine: joining the enemy at the time of martial law or armed conflict, espionage, assistance in subversive activities against Ukraine provided to a foreign state, a foreign organization or their representatives, shall be punishable by imprisonment for a term of ten to fifteen years.’

Likewise, in its Resolution 49/1 adopted on 4 March 2022, the Human Rights Council ‘condemned in the strongest possible terms the human rights violations and abuses and violations of international humanitarian law resulting from the Russian Federation’s aggression against Ukraine’. The Council expressed ‘grave concern at the documented harm to the enjoyment of many human rights, including the rights to life, education, and the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, caused by Russian shelling and bombing in populated areas’. Further, Council resolution 49/1 expressed grave concern at reports of ‘gross and systematic violations and abuses of human rights’, thereby invoking the explicit language of GA Resolution 60/251 in so far as concerns the threshold
for suspension

We are deeply concerned about the mass-scale massacres of civilians in war and non-war zones in Ethiopia as recently reported by Human Rights Without Frontiers.

In a written statement submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Council (Forty-ninth session 28 February–1 April 2022) which was submitted through Coordination des Associations et des Particuliers pour la Liberté de Conscience, a non-governmental organization in special consultative status in the United Nations Human Rights Council, it was demanded that the gross violation of human rights in Balochistan needs immediate attention and intervention from the international community.

The statement mentions that scholars have recognized that corruption is a violation of human rights. “Thirteen years ago, CAP-LC states, the Maastricht Center for Human Rights in the Netherlands organized an important conference on corruption as a human rights issue, on October 22–23, 2009. The majority position at the Maastricht conference was that there is indeed a provision in international law that makes corruption a violation of human rights. It is article 2, number 1, of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.” The provision mandates that states should remove the obstacles to the full enjoyment of human rights by their citizens, and there is little doubt that corruption is such an obstacle.

We have learned that egregious crimes such as forced organ harvesting from living Falun Gong practitioners has occurred for over two decades in the People’s Republic of China. Irrefutable evidence has been gathered and led to a unanimous judgement. The international community appears to be overwhelmed in the handling of crimes against humanity to the extent that the values of our civilization are at stake. Humankind has to decide if it accepts or rejects the killing of human beings for forced organ harvesting or other exploitations.

Escalation of Human Rights Violations in the 21st century : State-sponsored Forced Organ Harvesting of Living People

Inspire and equip policy makers to address and effectively work to repeal the death penalty for choice or expression of religion or belief.

We would like to draw the Council’s attention to arbitrary arrests and enforced disappearances of Baloch political activists, leaders, students, doctors, intellectuals, writers, and human rights defenders. They are being picked up by security forces or their proxy death squads and kept incommunicado for years. As a result of this practice, thousands of Baloch remain missing.  Tortured bodies of thousands have been found.

We are profoundly grateful to UN working group on Enforced and Involuntary disappearances for comprehensively raising the issue of forced abduction of Sindhis through a joint communication in March this year. Despite this, disappearances of Sindhi political and human rights activists by Pakistani secret agencies continue unabated. In the month of August alone more than 10 prominent political workers and human rights activists including Insaf Dayo, Ayoub Kandhro, Suhail Raza Bhatti, Zakir Sahito, Kashif Tagar have been abducted. 

The Tamils have been fighting for over seventy years for self Determination. We are a nation of people living in the merged North and East in the island of Ceylon. We have our right to determine our own destiny.  Successive Sri Lankan Sinhala – Buddhist Governments have continually suppressed Tamils right to self-determination and govern Tamils employing brutal military force to annihilate, which amounts to Genocide.

The human rights violations in Balochistan by Pakistan have many aspects. These include enforced disappearances, kill and dump, illegal detentions, torture of political and human rights activists. Human rights violations also include social, cultural, and economic aspects.

We are a NGO that specializes in the freedom of religious minorities. This statement reports to the UN on the urgent need to evacuate the religious minorities of Afghanistan – namely the Sikhs and Hindus of Afghanistan, who face religious persecution and an immediate threat to their lives, following the takeover by the Taliban. We make this statement jointly with UNITED SIKHS, an international humanitarian and advocacy NGO that has been associated with the Department of Public Office of the United Nations, since 2007, and the Gurdwara Guru Nanak Darbar, London, UK, which serves the largest Afghan Sikh congregation in the world.

The ECOSOC-accredited NGO CAP-LC (Coordination des Associations et des Particuliers pour la Liberté de Conscience) filed a written submission for the 48th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council, which starts in Geneva on September 13. The document is published on the Web site of the United Nations. CAP-LC expressed its concern for “the use of real estate seizures as a weapon to discriminate against religious and spiritual minorities.”

human rights experts have expressed their deep concern over the lack of attention to the serious human rights violations perpetrated against the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community around the world and called on the international community to step up efforts in bringing an end to the ongoing persecution of Ahmadi Muslims as follows:

Also taking the floor were the following non-governmental organizations: East and Horn of Africa Human Rights Defenders Project, Society for Threatened Peoples, Centre for Human Rights, Christian Solidarity Worldwide, Centre for Global Nonkilling, Coordination des Associations et des Particuliers pour la Liberté de Conscience, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, International Bar Association and CIVICUS.

There is a war in Ethiopia. It started with TPLF attacking the Ethiopian Defense Force of the government of Abiy Ahmed.

In this conflict, Amhara women and children are being killed and their villages are looted both by TPLF and governmental forces.

CAP Liberté de Conscience (21.06.2021) – Mr. Dalibor Močević, a Croatian and Bosnian national of Serbian descent, is a victim of human rights violations in Croatia. Following the prohibition of discrimination based on race, sex, language and religion in the Charter of the United Nations, the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights became the next important step in the legal consolidation of the principle of equality before the law and the resultant prohibition of discrimination.

CAP Liberté de Conscience is concerned about the relaunch of the fight against religious minorities in France since the recent reorganization of MIVILUDES (the Interministerial Mission of Vigilance and Fight Against Cultic Deviances) has been implemented.

At the beginning of 2020, the French Prime Minister announced a reorganization of MIVILUDES in response to a report from the Accounting Court (Cour des Comptes) which denounced the lack of professionalism of MIVILUDES in its working method and questioned the relevance of such an organization.

Tax weapons have been often used to discriminate against religious and spiritual minorities. This is becoming a global problem, and one the human rights community should be aware of.

In France, in 1996 a Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry established a blacklist of spiritual groups classified as “cults” (in French, sectes). 172 groups were thus criminalized, and a policy of repression was instituted against these spiritual movements.

On 30 August 2018 Mr. Fernand de Varennes (Special Rapporteur on minority issues), Mr. Joseph Cannataci (Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy) and Mr. Ahmed Shaheed (Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief) addressed the Hungarian Government in a letter 1 “concerning discriminatory measures against the Church of Scientology on the basis of religious belief.” 2

The Internet with Social Media has become “one of the most powerful instruments of the 21st century for increasing transparency in the conduct of the powerful, access to information, and for facilitating active citizen participation in building democratic societies.” The formation of an inclusive information society requires universal ability to access and contribute information, ideas, and knowledge so citizens can participate in discussions on public affairs and be part of the decision-making process. The Internet offers a new opportunity for developing policies on proactive transparency and dissemination of information and ideas of all kinds. Its speed, decentralization, and low cost allow both the State and private parties to disseminate information without barriers of borders, opportunity, or bureaucracy that once hampered such circulation