The ICT4Peace Foundation is pleased to endorse, support and recognise the UN’s first International Day for Countering Hate Speech, falling on 18 June 2022. As the UN Secretary General’s message marking the day notes,
Hate speech incites violence, undermines diversity and social cohesion, and threatens the common values and principles that bind us together.It promotes racism, xenophobia and misogyny; it dehumanizes individuals and communities; and it has a serious impact on our efforts to promote peace and security, human rights, and sustainable development.Words can be weaponized and cause physical harm. The escalation from hate speech to violence has played a significant role in the most horrific and tragic crimes of the modern age, from the antisemitism driving the Holocaust, to the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda.
In May 2022, ICT4Peace Special Advisor Dr Sanjana Hattotuwa was invited by the UN’s UN’s Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect to speak at a webinar on social media, civil society and combating hate speech. We are pleased to release a video of his remarks to mark the International Day for Countering Hate Speech.
In 2019, the Foundation welcomed the release of the UN Strategy and Plan of Action on Hate Speech. As we noted then,
As far back as 2010, after meetings with the Office of the UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, Mr. Francis Deng and the Special Adviser on the responsibility to protect, Mr. Edward Luck, the Foundation published ‘ICTs for the prevention of mass atrocity crimes‘. Some sections of the report, dealing with the challenges and opportunities of communications technology to prevent genocide, resonate deeply with the new plan of action against hate speech.
The Foundation’s interest in and commitment to this work, for well over a decade, spans work with many UN agencies including the Office for the High Commissioner on Human Rights, substantive input into the ‘Christchurch Call’ and diplomatic briefings in Switzerland. From Sri Lanka – which is twice mentioned in the Secretary-General’s remarks – to Myanmar, New Zealand to the Balkans, the Foundation’s research, training, workshops, output and reports have tackled head on the challenges around countering violence extremism online, and the rise of hate speech in online fora. The Foundation also fed into the High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation, the framework of which as noted dovetails with what’s required to combat hate speech in both physical and virtual domains.