Interview: ‘Don’t wait for the UN to act’ - Civil society urged to build new institutions
Elisa Massimino, Visiting Professor of Law and Executive Director of Georgetown's Human Rights Institute, has urged civil society organisations to be creative and build new institutions in the face of the inaction of the United Nations and other international organisations as human rights decline globally.
Speaking with Ismail Akwei on Global South Conversations, Elisa Massimino appealed to civil society activists to collaborate and refrain from spending too much time lamenting the global dysfunction.
“The United Nations, for example, people tend to forget that it is a bunch of governments, and it's only going to be really as good as those governments allow it to be or demand it to, and fund it to be. I think we can't rely on those institutions. We want them to be there. They're important, but we can't wait for them to act.
“We have to be creative as civil society activists and we have to look to regional cooperation. We have to build new institutions. We have to be working with each other. We can't spend too much time bemoaning the dysfunction. We don't have that kind of time. So we have to be, you know, we have to be aggressive in finding new ways of working,” she said.
She also highlighted the declining human rights situation in the United States and how civil society has to learn from other countries that have gone through similar phases in their democracy to fill the void created.
“The authoritarians are sharing the playbook. They are learning from each other. They are perfecting their evil plans. And we have to do the same thing because so many of the challenges that we're facing are similar...I think activists in the United States have enjoyed such freedom of movement and freedom of activism for so many years, and that is also changing now with attempts to outlaw protest, the intimidation of protestors, the infringements on academic freedom and just the sense of fear that's being instilled through the actions against immigrant communities.
“We have a lot to learn from people who have been through this before and know what the next steps are going to be, because this is, in my lifetime, at least, relatively new, this kind of, ignoring the courts, deploying the military in domestic enforcement. But a lot of our friends and colleagues in other countries have dealt with that. And so I think the way for civil society to fill that void is gonna be through learning from each other,” she advised.
Watch the full interview attached to this story.
This story is written and edited by the Global South World team, you can contact us here.
