UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide (OSAPG) will hold a Global Education Ministers Conference to address hate speech through education on October 26, 2021.
The one-day, high-level online Conference which will hold in the presence of Heads of State and Government, Ministers of Education, the United Nations Secretary-General and UNESCO Director-General, will seek to endorse global commitments to address hate speech, both on- and offline, through education.
The UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, in June 2019, launched a strategy to enhance the United Nations response to the global phenomenon of hate speech. As part of the implementation of the UN Strategy and Plan of Action on Hate Speech, the Secretary-General called upon UNESCO in partnership with the United Nations Office on the Prevention of Genocide and the Responsibility to Protect to convene the Global Education Ministers Conference and Multi-stakeholder Forum on addressing hate speech through education, to be held respectively on October 26 and September 30 –October 1, 2021.
In this context, education can play a fundamental role in addressing hatred both on- and offline, and help to counter the emergence of group-targeted violence. Strengthening educational responses to build the resilience of learners to exclusionary rhetoric and hate speech also lies at the core of the Education 2030 Agenda, and more specifically Target 4.7 of Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4), which touches on the social, moral and humanistic purposes of education.
For further questions or information, please contact the Secretariat team in UNESCO’s Section for Global Citizenship and Peace Education at gced@unesco.org.
