Traditional human rights organizations are increasingly betraying their original aims, pandering to dictatorial regimes and activists with dubious or openly vicious agendas.
The UN, originally conceived as the supreme protector of freedom and democracy, is using double standards and helps cover most heinous crimes of violence against women and minorities, even genocide.
Real minorities with no access to lobbying lost their voice to loud and aggressive crowds.
China is still occupying Tibet, an ancient and culturally unique civilization and country five times the area of the United Kingdom. In its western provinces, it conducts wide-scale genocide of Muslim minorities, complete with concentration camps and forced sterilizations.
In Sudan, Arab Janjaweed militias conduct a systematic, decades-long genocide of Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa people. Hundreds of thousands have been murdered, women and children raped and mutilated. Yet, the names of those ethnicities are completely unknown to the world and little is done to stop this huge crime against humanity.
Kurdish people, an ethnic and cultural entity of over 30 million, still don't have their country, facing oppression by Turkey, Iran, and Arab countries. Many other nations or ethno-cultural groups live under occupation, denied the basic rights like using their own language or practicing their religious and cultural customs.
Across much of the world today, the punishment for being gay is death. Across much of the world today, a woman who is raped can be tried and punished for the rape. Honour killings plague the minority societies in Western countries and developing countries alike.
These are not contested matters. There are no two sides. There is no angle from which they become acceptable.
Yet, by reading major newspapers, following the "human rights" activities on major university campuses, and watching the UN agenda, you may be forgiven to think this world is a serene and peaceful place, if not for Israel and some Western countries.
In the UN Human Rights Council, the worst human rights abusers sit alongside democratic countries, often having a majority. Dictators, corrupt officials, and sometimes even terror groups are pocketing billions in international aid.
There are no protests in the streets of European and American cities or at Western colleges against the occupation, genocide, and oppression in all those places.
There are several reasons for this situation. Post-colonial guilt in the Western world found its expression in the ideology presuming that the western and white is always bad, while the non-western and ethnic is always right no matter what. Mixed with a crooked version of political correctness, it spawned a kind of identity politics that prejudges the outcome of one's deeds based on who they are - applied to whole groups of people, some can never be right, while others can never be wrong.
This approach, which found, through often aggressive activism, its way into major organizations, also gives rise to polarization of democratic societies when such real failures are exploited in various ways by forces on the fringes of the political spectrum - a process made worse by the echo-chambers of today's social media.
The peoples named in this manifesto - and many more - are not forgotten by accident. The Uyghur, the Tibetan, the Darfuris, the Yazidi, the Baluchi, the Kurds, the Amazigh, together with the women murdered in honour killings and the gay and lesbian minorities imprisoned and executed across much of the world, have been systematically removed from the field of attention. Powerful states profit from the silence around their crimes. Influential frameworks in Western academia and major media find the silence convenient. This is not neglect. This is omission as policy.
Hence we believe that a new kind of human rights organization must be born, faithful to the original ideas of human rights for all, everywhere, without excuses and double standards.
We affirm the principle of the independent investigation of truth. Human dignity can only be protected when facts are sought sincerely, evidence is weighed fairly, and prejudice, whether political, ideological, national, racial, or religious, is set aside. We therefore endeavour to give voice to those who suffer injustice regardless of who they are or who their oppressors may be.
We believe that the right to life in freedom and dignity for every human regardless of their sex, sexual orientation, race, or religion is not a subject of political convictions, and the same is true concerning the collective rights of every ethno-cultural group. Therefore we are strictly non-partisan and apolitical. We do not align ourselves with any country, government, ideology, or political position except for belief in freedom and democracy.
A voice for the forgotten.