Franciscans International joins over 850 organizations in a global call to the Human Rights Council

Together with partners, Franciscans International hosted two virtual side events during the High-Level Political Forum (HLPF) on Sustainable Development and the 44^th Session of the Human Rights Council.

Despite the current travel restrictions, we continue to work with our Franciscan and other local partners to raise human rights issues directly at the United Nations. An overview of all our statements during this session of the Human Rights Council, delivered either in-person or by video, can be found here.

This week, two children human rights defenders addressed the UN Human Rights Council on protecting their rights and the environment. Franciscans International joins a call to action by civil society at this critical moment.

Franciscans International today renewed its call on the Human Rights Council to establish a Commission of Inquiry on the Philippines, after the High Commissioner for Human Rights presented a report which confirmed that serious violations have been committed during the country’s ongoing ‘war on drugs’.

Although a number of UN sessions have been postponed or cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we continue to engage relevant human rights mechanisms including through statements issued in collaboration with other civil society organizations. An overview of these joint statement can be found below. This page will be updated to include new statements as they become available.

In our second statement on the COVID-19 pandemic we focus on poverty and environmental justice as two key issues that illustrate the need for global governance, international cooperation and solidarity, concerted and coherent action, and a systemic change.

Civil society raises human rights concerns during informal virtual conversation with the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

As we, the entire staff of Franciscans International, are confined but healthy in our respective homes in Switzerland, the USA, and France, we are made more aware every day of our privileged situation, despite the unusual and uneasy circumstances in which confinement is putting us.

Two years before his death, Francis of Assisi wrote the ‘Canticle of the Creation’, praying tribute to the diversity yet interconnectedness he had come to see in the world around him. This song, which would inspire Pope Francis’ Laudato Si, praises water as “so useful, lowly, precious and pure.” In this contradiction he recognized water as a resource that is both a daily commodity and fundamental to sustain all life which must be protected...