Selective Compassion | Libera Mondo

The title is struck through on purpose. Selective compassion is not a value we hold; it is the thing this program exists to strike out.

In much of Western public life, compassion is rationed by the identity of the perpetrator. When the party held responsible is a Western government or a Western ally, the victims fill the campuses, the marches, and the front pages. When the party responsible is an authoritarian regime, an armed faction, or a movement that enjoys political sympathy, the same suffering - often a far larger toll - draws a hedged paragraph, or nothing. The dead are weighed by who killed them rather than by the fact that they are dead.

The rationing runs through two channels, and this program follows both. In the first, the killing is acknowledged but the killer is inconvenient to name. In the second, the abuse is not denied either - it is reclassified, as culture, as tradition, as somebody else's internal matter. The mechanisms differ. The result is identical: a person is left unprotected because of who was standing over them.

When the killer is inconvenient to name

Darfur. In Sudan, the Rapid Support Forces and allied Arab militias - the successors of the Janjaweed - have killed non-Arab Darfuris in numbers that defy comprehension. The UN counts more than 150,000 dead across the war since 2023; some former officials put it far higher. It is the largest displacement crisis on record, with more than eleven million driven from their homes, and the siege and fall of El Fasher in late 2025 produced mass killing visible from orbit. By the assessment of mainstream analysts, the rate of killing has at times run an order of magnitude above Gaza's - and has drawn a small fraction of the protest, coverage, and institutional response.
Iran. When Iranians rose after the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022, the state's own forces shot them in the streets. A UN fact-finding mission found her death unlawful and documented security forces firing on protesters; rights groups count more than five hundred killed, some twenty-two thousand detained, and over fourteen hundred executions in the two years that followed. The Western response was real but thin and short-lived - and the regime itself routinely deflects scrutiny by pointing to Gaza.
Palestinians killed by Hamas. Hamas has, across its years governing Gaza, rounded up and publicly executed Palestinians it labels collaborators or opponents - including a wave of more than thirty killings in late 2025 that the UN human rights office flagged as unlawful and that Palestinian human rights bodies condemned. The victims are Palestinian; the killers are not a designated villain; and the marches that fill Western squares for Palestinian suffering have little to say when the hand that kills is Palestinian.

These victims have one thing in common: no one with influence in the West gains by mourning them, and no one loses by ignoring them.

When the abuse is called culture

Many of the Western institutions that exist to defend human rights - universities, large NGOs, much of the press - apply their attention unevenly. Abuses inside Western societies are named quickly and at volume. The same abuses, or worse, committed in the developing world draw a quieter response, a hedged one, or none. The oppression of women and the murder of women by their own families for "honour"; the persecution of religious and ethnic minorities; the imprisonment and execution of gay people; forced labour and modern slavery - when these occur outside the West, they are too often treated as matters of culture to be understood rather than wrongs to be opposed.

The unevenness is not explained by the facts. For the abuses in question, prevalence runs heavily outside the West.

Sexual minorities. As of 2025, sixty-four states criminalise consensual same-sex relations, and seven prescribe the death penalty for them, with a handful more where the law is uncertain. These states are concentrated in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Every country in Europe has decriminalised.
Women and girls. More than 230 million women and girls alive today have undergone female genital mutilation - 144 million in Africa, 80 million in Asia, 6 million in the Middle East. An estimated 4.4 million girls are at risk in a single year, and in much of the practising world most are cut before the age of five.
Honour killings. The most-cited estimate, from the UN Population Fund, puts the number of women and girls murdered each year by relatives in the name of family honour at around 5,000. That figure dates from 2000, is widely treated as an undercount, and some organisations put it as high as 20,000. The killings cluster in South Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, and in diaspora communities from those regions. They sit within a larger pattern: the UN recorded some 50,000 women and girls killed by relatives or partners in 2024, the highest absolute numbers falling in Africa and Asia.

These are the places where the silence is loudest. They are also the places where the numbers are largest. The mismatch between the two is the subject of this program.

The objections we take seriously

The strongest defence of the first asymmetry is leverage. People protest what their own governments fund or enable, the argument runs, because that is where their voice can change an outcome; a citizen in London has more purchase on British arms policy than on the Rapid Support Forces or the Iranian judiciary.

There is something to this, and we do not dismiss it. But it does not account for the scale of the gap, and it does not account for the silence turning, at times, into justification - Western voices explaining away Hamas's executions, or unable to name a higher-rate killing as what it is while naming a lower-rate one instantly. Leverage explains where people lobby. It does not explain whose deaths they are willing to see. A principle that mourns the victim only when the killer is convenient is not a principle; it is a preference wearing the clothes of one.

The defence of the second is respect for other cultures - a reluctance, rooted in the West's colonial history, to impose its own standards on societies it once dominated. The caution is reasonable. The conclusion drawn from it is not.

Cultural relativism, applied to these cases, produces a perverse result: the people already worst-treated are denied the protection extended to everyone else, and they are denied it in the name of sensitivity. When an honour killing is reported first as a custom and only second as a murder, the framing has already taken a side. The position also rests on a factual error. Universal human rights are not a Western possession. The people resisting these abuses across the global South - the women campaigning against forced marriage, the lawyers defending the accused, the activists risking prison - are overwhelmingly from within the societies in question, and they are asking for solidarity, not silence. To treat a woman in one country as less entitled to bodily safety than a woman in another is not respect. It is a double standard, which is the very thing the caution claims to avoid.

Why it matters now

The world's population is shifting toward the regions where these abuses are most common. A human rights movement that averts its eyes from the non-Western world is, with each passing decade, averting its eyes from a larger share of the people it exists to defend. The selective gaze does not merely leave some victims uncovered today; it points the movement away from where most of the need will be tomorrow.

How the program works

Selective Compassion is a documentation and advocacy program.

Documentation. Recording the toll of the conflicts, crackdowns, and abuses that the selective gaze passes over - prevalence, laws, and cases, with sources - and setting them beside the attention they receive, so the asymmetry is visible rather than merely felt.
Platform. Carrying on Meridian 21 the accounts of victims whose killers are not fashionable to name, and the voices of those resisting these abuses from inside the societies where they occur.
Engagement. Putting that record to the institutions that practise the silence - the universities, NGOs, and media outlets - and to the public and decision-makers who set the terms of attention.

Where we stand

Libera Mondo is strictly non-partisan and apolitical. This program is not a ranking of victims, and it is not a claim that any culture is inferior to another. It is the opposite: that a victim's worth does not depend on the identity of the perpetrator or on where they were born, and that the test of a conscience is whether it can mourn the dead it has no political reason to mourn. The people killed in Gaza are owed that recognition. So are the people killed in Darfur, in Iran, and by Hamas; so are the women and girls cut, married off, or murdered by their own families, and the people imprisoned or executed for whom they love. We apply one standard everywhere. We let the record make the case.

Read: The Unmourned Read: The Geography of Silence

A voice for the forgotten.