New York, 14 November 1997

52nd Session of the General Assembly/Third Committee

Item: 114 (e): Report of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights

Statement by Mary Robinson, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights

[...] While human rights violations continue to affect individuals and groups everywhere, for those who are summarily executed, arbitrarily detained, tortured, disappear against their will or are discriminated against simply because of their sex, colour, ethnic origin or religion, or are excluded from the benefits of society and left in conditions of extreme poverty, every single violation is one too many. As impunity is still rampant in so many parts of the world, these violations bring a further offense to human dignity. We must act now in order to avoid that impunity is allowed to prevail and that we always consider the need for justice on the part of the victims.

Ad Hoc international tribunal recently established must be welcome yet an international criminal court is the next step that the international community need to take. I therefore look forward with great interest to efforts in this sense and to the results of the international conference aimed at adopting the statute of a permanent international penal court to be held in Italy next June. [...]