Tackle Discrimination, Inequality -UN HR Chief

The new UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navanethem Pillay, in her maiden address to States attending the Human Rights Council last Monday highlighted the need to tackle discrimination and inequality which undermine development, security, peace and justice, says in a press release issued by the UN Information Centre.

Pillay who herself was a victim of both racial and gender discrimination in apartheid South Africa said that if discrimination and inequality were allowed to fester, it would poison harmonious co-existence. Pillay also made a powerful call for a stronger focus on preventing genocide, as well as the cycles of violence, the mobilization of fear and the political exploitation of difference - ethnic, racial and religious difference - that lead to it.

Pillay, who spent eight years as a judge on the Rwanda Tribunal and five on the International Criminal Court in The Hague before taking up her post as High Commissioner on September 1.