UN condemns insults to Vinicius Junior and cites George Floyd case

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, condemned this Wednesday the insults received last Sunday by vinicius junior and called on sporting event organizers to implement “strategies to prevent racism in sport”.

“The racist abuse suffered by Vinicius Júnior this Sunday reminds us of the prevalence of racism in sport, and I urge sporting event organizers to implement strategies to prevent and combat it,” Türk said at a press conference.

“Much more is needed to eradicate racial discrimination, and that must start by listening to people of African descent, involving them and taking real action to address their main concerns,” added the Austrian High Commissioner.

“We need to look at sport and human rights from a wide range of perspectives,” Türk said, noting that it was also possible to observe worrying attitudes at the last World Cup in Qatar.

Türk further said that in light of these incidents, his office is interested in “offering guidance to sports federations” on how to put human rights standards into practice, “fight against stigmatization, racism and discrimination against the LGBTQIA+ community”.

Spanish authorities’ reaction to the case of George Floyd

At the end of the press conference, he commented that in the case of Vinicius, the reaction of the Spanish authorities has been “energetic”, with rapid arrests of the alleged perpetrators of the injuries, but he stressed that societies themselves also have to make efforts to prevent these events from happening. again.

“Everyone should ask themselves: am I prejudiced, do I measure my words, how do I react when someone makes a racist comment?”, he exemplified to reporters.

the high commissioner linked the attacks on Vinicius to the murder of George Floyd in the United States three years ago, noting that “it is clear that the problem of police brutality against people of African descent will not be solved until we deal with the broader problem of systematic manifestations of racism that permeate all aspects of our lives”.

On this police brutality, Türk lamented that the exemplary sentence against the perpetrators of the crime of George Floyd “remains an exception both in the United States and in the world”.

“I remain concerned about the frequent reports of deaths and injuries of people of African descent in relation to security forces in several countries”, warned the High Commissioner, who called for “prompt and firm action by the authorities to guarantee justice in each of these cases”.