Born in Senegal in 1941, Doudou Diène holds a Law degree from the University of Caen, a Ph.D. in Public Law from the University of Paris, and a diploma in Political Science from the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris. In 2017, he was appointed by former President François Hollande of France to help lead the public interest group, “Mission on the Memory of Slavery, Treaties and their Abolition.” And in 2018, he was appointed Chair of the Commission of Inquiry on Burundi by the President of the United Nations Human Rights Council.

After serving as Deputy Representative of Senegal to UNESCO (1972–77) and, in that capacity, as Vice-President and Secretary of the African Group and Group of 77, he joined the UNESCO Secretariat in 1977 and was appointed Director of the Liaison Office with the United Nations Permanent Missions and departments in New York in 1980. Between 1985 and 1987, he held the posts of Deputy Assistant Director-General for External Relations, Spokesperson for the Director-General and Acting Director of the Bureau of Public Information. After a period as Project Manager of the “Integral Study of the Silk Roads: Roads of Dialogue,” aimed at revitalizing East-West dialogue, he was appointed Director of the Division of Intercultural Projects in 1993 (now called the Division of Intercultural Dialogue). In this capacity, he directed various projects on intercultural dialogue, including the Slave Route, Routes of Faith, Routes of al-Andalus, and Iron Roads in Africa. In 1998 he was placed in charge of activities pertaining to inter-religious dialogue, and in 2002, he was appointed by the Commission on Human Rights as Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, a mandate that was later extended by the Human Rights Council. In 2011, he was appointed United Nations Independent Expert on the Situation of Human Rights in Côte D’Ivoire, and served as Member of the United Nations Independent Commission of Inquiry on Gaza from 2014-15.

He is the author of numerous publications and has chaired and been the distinguished guest on various panels, radio, and television programs, including Neuf siècles de guerres saintes (May 1996), UNESCO/ARTE; Sur la piste des caravanes: L’endroit de toutes les rencontres (February 1998); Sur la route des épices (March 2000), UNESCO/NDR/ARTE; and a programme in the Thalassa series on The Slave Route (FR3, April 1998). He is co-author of Patrimoine culturel et créations contemporaines and of Vol. 35, No. 2 of the Journal of International Affairs on the New World Information Order. He has also published many articles on the issue of intercultural and inter-religious dialogue in journals such as Archeologia, Historia, Sciences et Vie, and Actualité des Religions. He was also Editorial Director of From Chains to Bonds, (UNESCO, 1998) and wrote the preface to Tradition orale et archives de la traite négrière (UNESCO, 2001), as well as the editorial of Newsletter No. 2 of The Slave Route (UNESCO, 2001).

Pratima T. Narayan is a Senior Program Manager with the Global Initiative for Justice, Truth and Reconciliation.  She has over 14 years of experience conducting and leading investigations into violations of international human rights and humanitarian law, as well as white collar crimes involving corporate and government entities.  Her expertise on gender has been cited in legal treatises.

Pratima began her career with the Legal Aid Society in New York City, where she managed emergency eviction cases for impact litigation in the South Bronx. She then practiced law with private firms before going on to hold various positions with the United Nations, including most recently as the Chief of Investigations for the UN Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan.

Pratima’s diverse range of experience includes monitoring and reporting on breaches of international human rights and humanitarian law with the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Mali (MINUSMA), developing capacity-building programs in education and curriculum, as well as advocacy and legal representation with various non-governmental organizations in Japan, South Africa and Greece. In 2018, Pratima was selected to participate in a U.S. Department of State investigation into atrocities allegedly committed against the Rohingya community in Myanmar.

Pratima holds a J.D. from Boston University School of Law and a B.S. in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University where, among other honors, she was awarded the Cornell Tradition Larry Lowenstein Fellowship for her commitment to public service.  She also holds a postgraduate diploma in Education from the Open University of Tanzania. Pratima is admitted to practice law in New York State and is proficient in English, Spanish and French, as well as conversational in Japanese.

Prior to joining the Coalition, Liz served as CEO of Cinereach, a foundation supporting film and media projects focused on social change and as Executive Director of FilmAid International, a humanitarian relief organization using film and video to address the needs of refugees and other displaced communities. Prior to joining FilmAid, she led the major gifts program at Amnesty International USA to record growth while advocating for human rights in the U.S. and abroad. Her extensive experience with community-based media projects gives her a unique perspective on the power of the personal story to engage broad audiences in moving from past to present and memory to action. As a featured speaker at conferences and workshops around the world, Liz has addressed issues ranging from psycho-social relief initiatives in displaced communities to the role of memory in building civic engagement in emerging democracies and post-conflict settings. She has served on the board of ICOM-US, the U.S. National Committee of the International Council of Museums; is a member of the Law Advisory Council for the Fetzer Institute; and serves as an International Advisor to the Accounts of the Conflict project at the University of Ulster INCORE and as an International Advisor to UNESCO and the World Heritage Programme.

Throughout her career, Silvia has worked for and collaborated with a variety of public and private institutions dedicated to a spectrum of human rights work including education, advocacy and public engagement; has organized conferences and workshops on human rights, memorialization and transitional justice around the globe; and has spoken widely in international summits on memorialization and new methodologies for human rights education and social change.

Silvia has worked with the Coalition in various roles since 2008, providing overall support to its membership and leading the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of projects devoted to transforming sites of trauma into centers for positive social change.

I identify as a first-generation Guyanese American woman. My pronouns are she/her/hers.

As the daughter of immigrants from the Caribbean, I grew up in an environment that was very much influenced by colonial legacies— we addressed our elders by their title, paid a certain level of deference to authority and loved the Royal Family like they were our own.

At the same time, I’ve grown up in New York City, exposed to the richness its diversity of cultures has to offer.

I’ve worked with UNESCO and the Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights (OHCHR) in Geneva, Switzerland which has contributed to a certain level of understanding and familiarity with the mechanisms and processes I will describe, while fueling a certain level of curiosity to learn more about how they came to be, but I am by no means here speaking on behalf of them or the United Nations.

George Floyd’s death in May 2020 would inspire protests against racism and police brutality around the world but for many people of color in America, it was yet another blow in a continuum of violence that predates our nation’s founding. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve also witnessed authoritarianism take hold as political and military leaders use the pandemic as a pretext to crackdown on the fundamental rights of racial, ethnic, religious, and linguistic minorities in several nations and a shrinking civic space.

And as the global anti-racism movement has taken hold, I’m a very firm believer that the fight against racism must first begin by being informed about the past.

That means understanding how racism developed, how states were formed, and the way this has really shaped the entire human rights system.

So, let’s start by unpacking this a bit and looking at how racism has developed—

Social constructs and classifications based upon racial identity are believed to have first been introduced during the Middle Ages where authority was conveyed based on lineage and purity of the bloodline.

This is not to say that other communities outside of Europe did not interact or experience discrimination or even that slavery did not exist prior to this, but there remain very divergent perspectives about whether skin color held the same racial significance in ancient times as in modern times. There is also less widely accessible documentation of this phenomenon among other cultures. 

During the Enlightenment period, philosophers and scientists claimed natural laws governed the world and informed a universal order which privileged white skin because other groups were “uncivilized” or “barbaric”.[i]

In 1735, Carolus Linnaeus first classified the human species, homo sapiens, according to four major groups Europaeus, Americanus, Africanus and Asiaticus, with physical and behavioral traits that were innately superior or inferior.

The dissertation, On the Natural Varieties of Mankind in Germany in 1775, identified Mongolians, Americans, Ethiopians, and later Malays as degenerates of the primeveal being, Caucasians, lending further credence to the idea of the racial hierarchy.[ii]

As racial theories expanded and became more deeply entrenched throughout the nineteenth century, Gobineau’s essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853-1855) popularized intellectual myths which claimed mixing races compromised white superiority by diminishing the purity of the race’s blood.[iii]

This paved the way for Scottish jurist James Lorimer’s subsequent distortion of international law which tied the concept of ‘statehood’ to the ‘quality’ of its inhabitants’ race.[iv] In 1883, in The Institutes of the Law of Nations, Lorimer asserted that the white race’s absolute claims of racial superiority would be compromised if other communities, particularly ‘negros’ were recognized as equals or in power.[v]

 

So, I know this all sounds very academic, but it is important to show how a progression of thinking led to very deeply entrenched ideas about race and white supremacy that still very much influence our thoughts and behaviors today.

This brings us to an understanding of how states and the world order were created.

In the period after World War I, racial animus reached new heights. The War’s protagonists felt entitled to draw upon their colonies for human and material resources to sustain their wartime efforts, and four million people throughout their colonies were mobilized to support the Allies. 

India singularly contributed the most troops at 1.4 million, while over two million soldiers and laborers were engaged across the continent of Africa.

Japan also played a strong role in supporting the Allies militarily but when it tried to introduce a racial equality clause in the Paris Peace Negotiations, U.S. President and Lead negotiator Woodrow Wilson repeatedly rejected these proposals. 

The resulting Covenant of the League of Nations went further to codify racial inequality by categorizing territories from the former Turkish Empire, Central and South West Africa and South Pacific Islands within a Mandate System of governance with varied levels of control.

The Mandates within the League of Nations were viewed as incapable of maintaining themselves under the “strenuous conditions of the modern world” and in need of tutelage by “advanced nations” that would act on behalf of the League.

So, you see the League of Nations also being used as a tool to reinforce Britain and France’s imperial expansion.

By the time the United Nations was established in 1945, its Charter would introduce an International Trusteeship System for the supervision of certain territories, including the Trust Territories so you begin to see a growing tension between the discriminatory paternalism that permeated existing global systems and the spirit of self-determination embodied in the United Nations Charter.

A key example of this tension was the international campaign against apartheid in South Africa which was led by India and took off almost as soon as the UN was created.  Lasting nearly five decades, the international campaign against apartheid would raise awareness of the pernicious nature of white supremacist ideology. The campaign would also gain strength as more and more states underwent decolonization.

 

The fight for racial equality would spawn a human rights movement that would extend to other fundamental rights, resulting in the most far-reaching body of standards than any other area of international law. Emerging from the Holocaust and World War II, the desire to create stronger, legally binding obligations for nations would inspire the Genocide Convention in 1948. A day later, a drafting committee comprised of representation from the sovereign regions of the world would produce the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which enshrined 30 fundamental rights aimed at promoting peace, freedom and justice for all. Several other mechanisms to combat racism would be introduced, including the International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

 

The Convention established the first human rights treaty body, the Committee on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD). CERD bears responsibility for issuing general recommendations and reviewing government’s progress in the implementation of the Convention, in addition to fielding early warning and urgent action requests. While 182 countries have ratified the Convention, only 59 states have accepted optional Article 14 for the individual communications procedures. Though NGOs are encouraged to participate in the Committee’s review of states’ compliance, the mechanism has been critiqued as an elite piece of machinery that is slow to act and largely inaccessible to grassroots civil society organizations and their representatives.

 

International NGOs tied to the Global North more easily access the Committee which simply replicates the power and racial imbalances in the global system. Further, CERD has historically been staffed by nominated active or retired diplomats which has implied that Governments have treated racism as a foreign policy issue, rather than as a point for genuine introspection. Governments usually submit their initial or periodic reports with delays. Moreover, many states have failed to adopt comprehensive national action plans against racial discrimination or other enabling legislation that would give the convention’s provisions effect or allow for appropriate remedies to be institutionalized domestically.

 

Over time, the UN would introduce 24 resolutions addressing the situation in South Africa and a host of other mechanisms to address systemic racism there and in other parts of the world—these would include the Apartheid Convention, the Rome Statute which codifies several dedicated atrocity crimes with the specific intent involving race, international days and periods of commemoration against racism. The Durban Declaration and program of action coming out of the world conference against racism and most recently the Responsibility to Protect doctrine.

Cases would go before the ICJ, the ICC and the hybrid mechanisms for Yugoslavia and Rwanda – all challenging the idea of racism but we still find ourselves arguably back in the same place with systemic racism thriving in many parts of the world, undermining sustainable development, fueling conflict, and threatening our collective peace and security.

 

As Doudou served as the Special Rapporteur for contemporary forms of racism, one of the mechanisms created to combat racism in 1993, I think this is a good place to leave off.