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https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/12/21/sixty-years-ago-the-world-tried-to-stop-racial-discrimination-and-failed>
"The way the story is often told is that Western countries gifted human rights
to the world and are the sole guardians of it. It may come as a surprise for
some, then, that the international legal framework for prohibiting racial
discrimination largely owes its existence to the efforts of states from the
Global South.
In 1963, in the midst of the decolonisation wave, a group of nine newly
independent African states presented a resolution to the United Nations General
Assembly (UNGA) calling for the drafting of an international treaty on the
elimination of racial discrimination. As the representative from Senegal
observed: “Racial discrimination was still the rule in African colonial
territories and in South Africa, and was not unknown in other parts of the
world … The time had come to bring all States into that struggle.”
The groundbreaking
International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
Racial Discrimination (ICERD) was unanimously adopted by the UNGA two years
later. The convention rejected any doctrine of superiority based on racial
differentiation as “scientifically false, morally condemnable and socially
unjust”.
Today, as we mark 60 years since its adoption, millions of people around the
world continue to face racial discrimination – whether in policing, migration
policies or exploitative labour conditions."
Via Frederick Wilson II.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
