It is certainly not internationally known, the new United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Volker who? Turk, Volker Turk. Turk? Is he from Turkey then? No, he was born and raised in Austria.
For almost all of his adult life, the Austrian was a UN bureaucrat. Operating in the field in conflict areas, or at offices in Geneva, usually employed by the United Nations Refugee Agency UNHCR. Not work that brings you publicity as a person, unless you are in charge of the organization. Türk now comes for the first time in such a position.
It could be argued that it may not even be that strange, that obscurity. Silent diplomacy can benefit from an unspoken profile. But that’s the point: the High Commissioner for Human Rights is ideally not a silent diplomat. In fact, it’s not even a diplomat.
He (four times a she in the past) is above all an inspector, even a watchdog, who sees to it that the human rights recognized by the world community are actually respected. Even by superpowers who sometimes think they are above the law.
“The only criterion for a high commissioner,” said Kenneth Roth, who recently resigned as director of Human Rights Watch after 30 years, “is a willingness to investigate on principle and to address serious violations by governments, no matter how powerful.” condemn. Point.’
Precisely for this reason, human rights organizations sounded some snide criticism after UN Secretary-General António Guterres announced that he wanted to appoint Türk as the successor to Chilean Michelle Bachelet. A proposal that was ratified by the UN General Assembly on Thursday.
Predecessors were already big names when they took office. Bachelet was former president of Chile. Mary Robinson was former President of Ireland. Louise Arbor had been chief prosecutor of the ICTY. Navi Pillay had been president of the Rwanda Tribunal.
But Turk? Office clerk at the UN in Geneva, to put it disrespectfully. Can he become the ‘strong and vocal’ human rights chief Human Rights Watch had called for? Or has he mainly been appointed as a faithful executor of UN chief Guterres’ agenda? A, indeed, good bureaucrat?
Certainly, diplomacy also comes into play at work. Governments should be massaged to cooperate with UN human rights mechanisms. They must give permission (which is not always possible) for the UN to investigate possible violations. But such an investigation is always followed by a judgment, and possibly a conviction. And it is the High Commissioner who gives weight to that. Polite but not necessarily diplomatic.
This is exactly what plays out in the file that Türk first finds on his desk: Xinjiang. Pastor Bachelet visited the Chinese province in May. Human rights groups were dismayed when she barely said anything about the oppression of the Uyghur people at the closing press conference. But behold, her report, published the day she retired, does condemn the ‘crimes against humanity’ in Xinjiang. Now China is obviously angry. It is up to Türk to wash this pig in a ‘principled and vocal’, but also diplomatic way.
Volker Türk comes from Linz, Austria’s third largest city, not far from the border triangle with Germany and the Czech Republic. On the balcony of Linz Town Hall, Adolf Hitler had proclaimed the Greater German Reich, after Austria’s Anschluss to Nazi Germany. Hitler previously attended gymnasium there, more than 75 years before Türk, born in 1965, did the same.
It can be assumed that the awareness of the horrors of Hitler’s Nazi regime contributed to the interest in human rights that Türk showed from an early age. At the age of 15, he was introduced to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights during his English class, a document that fascinated him so much that he decided to make it his life’s work.
He went on to study law at the University of Linz and subsequently wrote a dissertation on the mandate of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. After a few years of teaching at the university, he joined the UN refugee agency UNHCR.
After that, there’s really not much exciting to say about his long UN career, other than a flawless career at UNHCRe that took him to exciting areas hit by humanitarian crises, such as Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Ruud Lubbers was one of his bosses until 2005. But especially with his successor as High Commissioner for Refugees, the Portuguese Guterres, Türk got along very well. Guterres brought him back to headquarters in Geneva and appointed him to leadership positions. In the end, he was even deputy High Commissioner.
Türk is therefore perhaps best compared to one of his other predecessors, Sergio Vieira de Mello (2002-2003). He too had been tried and tested in the UN apparatus (particularly UNHCR), such that his name was already buzzing as a possible future UN chief. In one respect, it is to be hoped for Türk that the comparison does not hold. De Mello was killed in a 2003 bomb attack on the UN headquarters in Baghdad.
THREE TIMES VOLKER TÜRK
More than ten names sang around the UN headquarters in New York as a possible successor to Michelle Bachelet. None of them have the stature of some previous people in the post of High Commissioner. Good chance seemed to make the Senegalese Adama Dieng, former UN adviser for the prevention of genocide.
Volker Türk usually visits his birthplace Linz three or four times a year. He invariably takes a Linzer cake, a kind of flan, baked by his mother back to Geneva. This is very much appreciated at the UN office.
Türk was awarded the Human Rights Prize of the University of Graz . in 2016 in Austria. One of the previous laureates was Simon Wiesenthal. The Nazi fighter worked from Türk’s hometown of Linz, opposite the childhood home of Adolf Hitler and next to the childhood home of Adolf Eichmann, architect of the persecution of the Jews.