UN rights chief Volker Turk warns that the world needs to change direction if it is to avoid a future filled with military escalation, repression, disinformation, deepening inequality and rampant climate change. Opening a session of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, Volker Turk stresses that "we are at a fork in the road" and heading towards "a dystopian future."
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00:00It seems to me we are at a fork in the road.
00:06We can either continue on our current path, a treacherous new normal,
00:12and sleepwalk into a dystopian future,
00:15or we can wake up and turn things around for the better, for humanity and the planet.
00:22The new normal cannot be endless, vicious military escalation
00:28and increasingly horrifying technologically advanced methods of warfare, control and repression.
00:36The new normal cannot be continued indifference to deepening inequalities between and within states.
00:45It cannot be the free-for-all spread of disinformation, smothering facts,
00:51and the ability to make free and informed choices.
00:56Heated rhetoric and simplistic fixes erasing context, nuance and empathy,
01:04paving the way for hate speech and the dire consequences that will inevitably follow.
01:11There are those politicians, amplified by some media outlets,
01:16who scapegoat migrants, refugees and minorities, as we have seen, for example,
01:22around electoral periods in Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, the United Kingdom,
01:28and the United States of America, to name a few.
01:32They capitalize on anxiety and despair, pitting one group against the other,
01:38and they seek to distract and divide.
01:41History has shown us that hateful words can trigger hateful actions.