HRF’s Response to Durban III: Partnership with “We Have A Dream” Global Summit

NEW YORK (September 21, 2011) – The Human Rights Foundation (HRF) is proud to announce its partnership with the We Have A Dream Global Summit Against Discrimination and Persecution, taking place today and tomorrow in New York.

As world leaders gather at the United Nations Headquarters to commemorate the 2001 Durban conference on racism, discrimination, xenophobia, and intolerance, the Summit—formed by an international coalition of NGOs—will be held as a parallel event.

In this week’s issue of The Economist, HRF president Thor Halvorssen described this week’s UN conference—informally known as Durban III—as “the last act in a tragicomedy” that underscores the UN’s complacency with “despotic regimes which speak pretty words about human rights while they kill, torture, or jail their opponents.”

In response to Durban III, the Summit will bring the most urgent crises of discrimination and persecution to international attention, promote human rights and democracy, and give a voice to the voiceless. Many Summit presenters are democracy activists and survivors of dictatorship, hailing from the autocratic regimes represented at the General Assembly.

“The terrible irony of the Durban conferences,” said Halvorssen, “is that the organizers—largely repressive, one-party regimes—effectively use them as spectacles to distract the world from their own crimes by focusing attention exclusively on imperfect but open and democratic governments.”

Summit speakers include human rights and pro-democracy advocates, anti-racism activists, former political prisoners, and statesmen from around the world. The Summit will urge reform of the UN human rights apparatus to oppose the participation of repressive regimes like China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia that regulate basic human rights.

The program will feature several former speakers from the Oslo Freedom Forum, HRF’s annual human rights conference, including Ugandan gay rights activist Kasha Jacqueline, Chinese dissident and scholar Yang Jianli, Uyghur leader Rebiya Kadeer, and Iranian author and former political prisoner Marina Nemat. Other speakers at the Summit include journalist and author Mariane Pearl, Sudanese human rights activist and genocide survivor

John Dau, North Korean gulag survivor Kim Hye Sook, and Canadian member of parliament Irwin Cotler.

The Summit will take place across the street from the United Nations. Participation is by invitation only. To request an invitation, click here, and for a full list of speakers, click here. The Summit will also be webcast here on September 21 and 22. Join and follow the Summit on Facebook and Twitter.

HRF is a nonprofit nonpartisan organization that protects and promotes human rights globally, with an expertise in the Americas. We believe that all human beings are entitled to freedom of self-determination, freedom from tyranny, the rights to speak freely, to associate with those of like mind, and to leave and enter their countries.

Individuals in a free society must be accorded equal treatment and due process under law, and must have the opportunity to participate in the governments of their countries; HRF’s ideals likewise find expression in the conviction that all human beings have the right to be free from arbitrary detainment or exile and from interference and coercion in matters of conscience. HRF does not support nor condone violence. HRF’s International Council includes former prisoners of conscience Vladimir Bukovsky, Palden Gyatso, Václav Havel, Mutabar Tadjibaeva, Ramón J. Velásquez, Elie Wiesel, and Harry Wu.

Contact: Thor Halvorssen, Human Rights Foundation, (212) 246.8486, info@thehrf.org

• For more information about the We Have A Dream Global Summit please visit http://ngosummit.org