GENEVA, Sept 13, 2021 (BSS/AFP) - The UN rights chief warned Monday that
environmental threats were worsening conflicts worldwide and would soon
constitute the biggest challenge to human rights.

  Michelle Bachelet said climate change, pollution and nature loss were
already severely impacting rights across the board and said countries were
consistently failing to take the necessary action to curb the damage.

  "The interlinked crises of pollution, climate change and biodiversity act
as threat multipliers, amplifying conflicts, tensions and structural
inequalities, and forcing people into increasingly vulnerable situations,"
Bachelet told the opening of the 48th session of the UN Human Rights Council
in Geneva.

  "As these environmental threats intensify, they will constitute the single
greatest challenge to human rights of our era."

  The former Chilean president said the threats were already "directly and
severely impacting a broad range of rights, including the rights to adequate
food, water, education, housing, health, development, and even life itself".

  She said environmental damage usually hurt the poorest people and nations
the most, as they often have the least capacity to respond.

  Bachelet said recent months have unleashed "extreme and murderous climate
events", citing the fires in Siberia and California, and floods in China,
Germany and Turkey.

  She also said drought was potentially forcing millions of people into
misery, hunger and displacement.

  - 'Set the bar higher' -

  Bachelet said that addressing the environmental crisis was "a humanitarian
imperative, a human rights imperative, a peace-building imperative and a
development imperative. It is also doable."

  She said spending to revive economies in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic
could be focused on environmentally-friendly projects, but "this is a shift
that unfortunately is not being consistently and robustly undertaken".

  She also said that countries had "consistently failed to fund and
implement" commitments made under the Paris climate accords.

  "We must set the bar higher -- indeed, our common future depends on it,"
the UN rights chief said.

  Bachelet said that at the 12-day COP26 climate talks in Glasgow, set to
begin on October 31, her office would push for more ambitious, rights-based
commitments.

  Bachelet said that in many regions, environmental human rights defenders
were threatened, harassed and killed, often with complete impunity.

  She said economic shifts triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic had apparently
prompted increased exploitation of mineral resources, forests and land, with
indigenous peoples particularly at risk.

  "In Brazil, I am alarmed by recent attacks against members of the Yanomami
and Munduruku peoples by illegal miners in the Amazon," she said.

  - No progress on Xinjiang visit -

  In her opening global update, Bachelet touched on the human rights
situations in several countries, including Chad, the Central African
Republic, Haiti, India, Mali and Tunisia.

  On China, she said no progress had been made in her years-long efforts to
seek "meaningful access" to Xinjiang.

  "In the meantime, my office is finalising its assessment of the available
information on allegations of serious human rights violations in that region,
with a view to making it public," she said.

  Rights groups believe at least one million Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim
minorities have been incarcerated in camps in the northwestern region, where
China is also accused of forcibly sterilising women and imposing forced
labour.

  Beijing has strongly denied the allegations and says training programs,
work schemes and better education have helped stamp out extremism in the
region.