A delegation from Venezuela participates in the first session of the Permanent Forum on People of African Descent that takes place from December 5 to 8 at the Palace of Nations of the United Nations Office in Geneva, Switzerland.
This first session of the Forum focuses on strategies to combat systemic racism, racial discriminationxenophobia and related intolerance, explains in this regard the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Precisely about racism, representing Venezuela before the Forum, Jesús Escobar, president of the National Institute against Racial Discrimination, Incodir, pointed out that this is an organizing principle of the social structures and relations of domination of modernity.
«Racism is a constitutive principle that organizes, from within, all the relations of domination of modernity, from the international division of labor to epistemic, sexual, gender, religious, pedagogical, medical hierarchies, together with identities and subjectivities. ; hence its systemic character »he said before the United Nations Forum.
Escobar added that the capitalist economy and its division of labor is organized by the idea of race, and that the colonial and exclavist past is reproduced to the present.
Imposition of sanctions and systemic racism
“Systemic Racism emerges as a system of domination and inferiorization through a set of ideas, discourses and practices of invisibility, stigmatization, discrimination, exclusion, exploitation, aggression and dispossession” asserted Jesús Escobar.
In this sense, he highlighted the imposition of sanctions as a driving mechanism of inequality and systemic racism.
“Another driving mechanism of inequality, systemic racism, the perpetuation of colonialism and unfair gaps in development is the application of unilateral coercive measures against the well-being and peace of innocent peoples.”
For his part, he Permanent Representative of Venezuela to the UNHéctor Constant Rosales, also present at the Forum, highlighted Escobar’s emphasis during his speech on the Venezuelan Government’s commitment to the elimination of systemic racism.
“In the first session of the Permanent Forum of People of African Descent, an advisory body of the @UN_HRC, the president of @INCODIR, Jesús Escobar, highlighted the unrestricted support of the Venezuelan Government to materialize actions leading to the elimination of systemic racism,” published Constant Rosales on his account on the social network Twitter.
Permanent Forum of Afro-descendants
The Permanent Forum on People of African Descent was established by the UN General Assembly in August 2021 as a “consultative mechanism for people of African descent and other relevant stakeholders” and “as a platform to improve the security and quality of life and livelihoods of the Afro-descendants”.
In addition, it operates as an advisory body to the Human Rights Council, in line with the program of activities for the implementation of the International Decade for People of African Descent and in coordination with the existing UN mechanisms that promote actions to combat racism against Afro-descendants.
