Until late December of 2016, when a peace treaty was signed, the DRC was two years deep in political conflict that left many civilians vulnerable to abuse. In fact, the UN Human Rights Office reported that 64 percent of the over 5,000 human rights abuses that occurred that year were committed by the Congolese army and police. The UN Human Rights Council even wrote a letter to the President of the DRC, Joseph Kabila, demanding that stronger efforts be made to combat and report out on human rights abuses in the country. While the treaty was signed in December, the country has not yet enforced a comprehensive reform plan to address human rights abuses. Many are concerned that adding the DRC to the UN Human Rights Council sends the wrong message and allows the country to maintain the status quo rather than work towards higher human rights standards.

For others, the concern is not only about the DRC, but also about all other countries perpetrating human rights abuses. Notably, Venezuela,  Burundi, and Saudi Arabia are all serving terms on the Council. By including the DRC on the UN Human Rights Council, the credibility of the Council is undermined, as is its ability to hold abusers and violators of human rights accountable.

With these consequences and recent human rights abuses at the forefront, many leaders were quick to criticize the decision.  Ambassador Haley said in a statement that “countries that aggressively violate human rights at home should not be in a position to guard the human rights of others.” Louis Charbonneau, UN Director at Human Rights Watch, called it a “slap in the face to the many victims of the Congolese government’s grave abuses.”

The culture of complacency at the UN is troubling, especially when noting that many power struggles lie at the root of human rights abuses, including in the DRC. Recent history has proven that a stable power structure and strong, credible leadership are critical to ensuring the preservation of people’s rights.  In Burundi, political conflict has flooded the streets with blood and left refugees with wounds as deep as the divisions in the region. In Sudan, a quest for absolute political control has left the government standing on the tenets of  murder, assault, and repression. In Yemen, Saudi Arabia’s coalition has violated laws of war, causing famine and halting aid delivery by blockading all ports of entry.

The world needs stable leaders who are willing and capable to take on the responsibility of protecting human rights across the globe rather than simply posturing. The UN Human Rights Council is meant to be a group comprised of such individuals from around the world. Their mission is to help preserve human rights, but that cannot be done if their integrity is not maintained in the public eye. It is crucial that stricter rules and standards regulate elections to the Council. With the election of the DRC, a country that is a prime example of why the world needs the UN Human Rights Council, it is time to reevaluate the member selection process.  It is long past time to make human rights a genuine priority.

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Mira Mehta is a writer and a student at Westfield High School.  In her spare time, she enjoys debating and running on the cross country team.  This is her first year as a member of the Communications Task Force at STAND.

Fast forwarding to the recent crisis, although many cannot fathom it, extremist Buddhists have committed vast human rights abuses against the majority-Muslim ethnic group. In 2012, violence resulted in a mass exodus of the Rohingya. Buddhist monks and nationalists started burning Rohingya homes because a group of Rohingya men were accused of raping and killing a Buddhist woman. Hundreds of Rohingya were killed following this incident, in what Human Rights Watch called crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing. Indeed, approximately 662,400 Rohingya have been internally displaced since 2015. In addition to internal displacement, the Rohingya are seeking refuge throughout the region, including in Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand. Bangladesh formally hosts hundreds of thousands of refugees registered under the UNHCR, 100,000 unregistered refugees, and recently received an influx of 11,000 Rohingya in one day. In September, the country announced it would produce special identity cards for the Rohingya refugees in order to regulate migration numbers. Although Bangladesh has accepted a great number of refugees, there is a clear lack of proper and adequate infrastructure due to the increasing number of Rohingya refugees. Additionally, the camps are becoming overpopulated. There is high concern of disease spreading easily, especially cholera and tuberculosis. As the flow of refugees continues to increase, the number of aid organizations who are responding to the crisis have increased as well. However, local and foreign aid organizations are struggling to deliver aid to the camps. The Bangladesh government announced that they do not plan to give refugee status to Rohingya who have recently arrived in the country, as they expect the Rohingya to return home in the future. Rohingya refugees are stateless, and many have not been able to register with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).The differences between camps for registered and unregistered refugees are stark, as unregistered refugees are essentially “illegal foreigners”, susceptible to arrest at any time, and restricted from UNHCR services such as education centers, healthcare, and food sacks. Many lack humanitarian assistance, live without documentation, and struggle to find protection from the United Nations or the country to which they fled.

There is more that the international community can and must do in order to protect the Rohingya. Recent public condemnations, while important, will not suffice. Although there has been an increased recognition of the Rohingya crisis and members of the international community have called it a genocide, such as Bangladesh’s Foreign Minister and President Erdoğan of Turkey, many Southeast Asian states are still not establishing legal protections for the Rohingya refugees. Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN, a regional intergovernmental organization) members must further their efforts to ratify the United Nations Refugee Convention to help refugees and distribute proper resources to them. Only two of the ten ASEAN member states, Cambodia and the Philippines, have signed on to the 1951 Convention and its 1967 Protocol. As the Rohingya crisis continues to escalate, the international community, UNHCR, and ASEAN members must work together both to find effective means to alleviate the conflict and to provide additional humanitarian relief to those in refugee camps. The international community must be proactive in assisting the Rohingya with asylum and issue sanctions against the Burmese government in order to demonstrate unified efforts to end this humanitarian crisis.

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Rujjares Hansapiromchok is a senior at California State University, Northridge, double majoring in Political Science and Religious Studies, with a minor in African Studies. She is currently a team member of the Communications Task Force for STAND, after learning about STAND during her internship at Jewish World Watch in Los Angeles. She is passionate about genocide and mass atrocities prevention and hopes to work in the field of peace and conflict resolution in the future.

Statelessness can occur for a myriad of reasons. The United States State Department addresses that some statelessness is caused by naturalization laws, such as laws denying people the ability to obtain citizenship, laws denying a mother the ability to extend her nationality to her child, and laws denying citizenship for children born out of wedlock. Additionally, statelessness can be a result of paperwork mistakes, such as a hospital failing to register a birth or the loss or destruction of documents. While each case is a troubling scenario, the worst is when people are stripped of their citizenship by their nation for belonging to a certain racial or ethnic group. This action destroys the promised protection of individuals, thereby making them vulnerable to atrocities.

When citizen groups – most often minorities – are stripped of their rights and nationality, they become easy targets for persecution. Arguably the most famous case of this action was during the rule of Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum asserts that when the Nuremberg Laws were passed in 1935, the Jewish population in Germany lost all of their basic rights. These laws were an early, yet catastrophic, sign of the coming Holocaust, and the abuses Germany’s Jewish population experienced escalated sizably thereafter. Now, in Burma, 1.1 million Rohingya Muslims are considered stateless after the government rescinded their citizenship in 1982. The international community has called the Rohingya “the most persecuted minority in the world,” and a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing.” The aspect of being stateless makes their persecution much easier.

If nations around the world recognized and acted on the problems stateless individuals are forced to deal with, cases like the Holocaust and the persecution of the Rohingya could be minimized or even stopped earlier. Stateless people are not offered the protections of average citizens. As a result, attacking these minorities is relatively easy. For this reason, the United Nations has launched a campaign to end statelessness in ten years. Ultimately, the most difficult aspects of ending statelessness are that it must be a priority of each individual country, and that the true number of stateless people is difficult to ascertain because they are often not included in censuses or they prefer not to report that they are stateless because of the harm that could come from it. Whether the desired conclusion is probable or not, it is definitely a positive movement to combat the genocide and mass atrocities that can result from the denial of citizenship.

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Zachary Gossett is a member of the Communications Task Force for STAND. He is a first-year student at Butler University in Indianapolis, Indiana, where he is studying political science. He is passionate about protecting the rights of people of the world.  

Needless to say, such a massive crisis has placed enormous strain both on host countries and on service providers. As of 2 December, UNHCR has only received 59% of the funding it requested for 2014. Funding shortfalls have reached a breaking point. The World Food Programme (WFP), an organization under the United Nations system, was recently forced to discontinue a program that provided food vouchers to more than 1.7 million Syrian refugees in neighboring countries due to funding shortfalls. If WFP’s funding needs are not met as winter sets in, the program will stay closed, bringing disastrous consequences.

Amid such urgent funding shortfalls, however, a quiet crisis is brewing. Syrian refugees’ access to education has plummeted since the beginning of the crisis. Some 90 percent of Syrian children and youth between 6-17 years old are believed to be out of school. Syrian refugee youth, and would-be students, face a number of challenges in surrounding countries. From dropping out, to prohibitive costs, to full schools teaching foreign curriculums, aspiring Syrian refugee students face a long road to attaining even primary-level education. The result? As of September 2013, some 80% of Syrian refugee youth were out of school in Lebanon and 56% out of school in Jordan. The long-term effects of such a drastic demographic setback have the potential to severely damage the fabric of Syrian society. Lack of access to education can intensify gender inequalities and upset social cohesion and may exacerbate the already pervasive problem of high youth unemployment in the region. Investing in the education of Syrians today is a crucial first step to rebuilding Syrian society in the future.

UNICEF, the UN organization dedicated to the humanitarian needs of children, has been working to reverse this and other disturbing trends. However, it too has been affected by the severe funding gaps suffered by the entire UN system. As of June 2014, UNICEF had only received 40% of its required funds. In the midst of these massive UN funding shortfalls, Syrian nationals are taking action to fulfill the needs of the refugees themselves through a number of new non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

This year, Students Organize for Syria (SOS) at Columbia will be fundraising for one such organization, Jusoor. Jusoor, Arabic for ‘bridges’, is an NGO started by a group of Syrian expatriates working to mitigate the education crisis among Syrian refugees in Lebanon and is in the process of expanding their program into Jordan and Iraq.

Jusoor has been working with Syrian refugees in Lebanon since June 2013 and currently runs three educational centers serving about 1,200 children. The Refugee Education Program seeks to ensure that Syrian refugees in Lebanon have a holistic primary school education through integration into formal schooling whenever possible, introducing contextual curricula, and providing a strong psycho-social support.

Through its Scholarship Program, Jusoor helps Syrian students looking to complete their studies abroad attain academic scholarships at top universities across the US, Europe and the Middle East.

Jusoor’s Mentorship Program offers academic advice to students seeking help in their university application process and more information on academic choices. The program connects expatriate Syrians and volunteers with highly ambitious students in Syria to provide coaching and mentoring throughout their various application processes.

You can contribute to SOS’ fundraising campaign for Jusoor here.

Read the whole Perspectives on Syria series here!

Counting the Dead

Exploring the Historical Trend of Artist Oppression

Refugee Crisis

No One Can Thrive On #Just825