UN staff urge rights chief Volker Turk to call Gaza war a ‘genocide’

UN staff members have written to Volker Turk, the organization’s human rights chief, to publicly denounce the “genocide” that his office has waged, claiming that it violates the international human rights system.

The Staff Committee at the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in Geneva on Wednesday sent the letter to Turk, which included an appeal. Al Jazeera obtained a copy of the letter.

According to the letter, “a broad cross-section” of OHCHR staff members stated that, “based on extensive reporting by UN mechanisms and independent experts, the legal threshold for genocide had been met.”

Concerned staff expressed concern that the OHCHR should “reflect this assessment more explicitly in its public communications” and that failing to do so “risches eroding OHCHR’s standing as a trusted authority on human rights for everyone in the world.”

OHCHR staff expressed “profound frustration” over the magnitude, scope, and nature of reported violations, as well as their effects on civilians, particularly women and children.

It urged the UN to refrain from repeating historical mistakes, noting that the UN’s “silence” during the 1994 Rwandan genocide, which claimed more than 1 million lives, was “often cited as one of its] greatest moral failures.”

The letter continued, “OHCHR has a strong legal and moral obligation to denounce acts of genocide.” The UN and the human rights system’s own credibility are undermined by failing to denounce an ongoing genocide.

More than 300 people have died from starvation as a result of a confirmed famine in some of the enclave, while at least 62, 966 Palestinians have been killed and nearly 160, 000 have been wounded during the conflict, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health.

Turk: Shared with “moral indignation”

The UN rights chief claimed that the staff had raised significant concerns in Turk’s response to the letter, which was reported by the Reuters news agency.

In addition to calling on staff to remain united as an Office in the face of such hardship, he said, “I know we all share a feeling of moral indignation at the horrors we are witnessing, as well as frustration in the face of the international community’s inability to put an end to this situation.”

OHCHR spokesman Ravina Shamdasani responded to a request for comment on the letter that was leaked by the news agency, claiming that staff members had had difficult circumstances to document the abuses that were taking place because of the conflict in Gaza.

She told Reuters, “There have been and will continue to be discussions internally about how to proceed.”

Growing rumors of a genocid

The UN has not used the term, with UN officials claiming that it is up to international courts to determine genocide, despite the fact that Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have all spoken in favor of it.

In 2023, South Africa saisied the International Court of Justice for a genocide case against Israel, but it has not yet been heard.

The term is also used by some rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Francesca Albanese, an independent UN expert.