From Somalia to Ukraine to Xinjiang in China, Volker Türk will have no shortage of challenges as he steps into one of the United Nations’ most delicate roles.
GENEVA — Barely a month after taking office as the United Nations’ new human rights chief, Volker Türk was in Sudan’s war-torn Darfur region last week meeting victims of a conflict that has displaced millions.
A day later, in the capital, Khartoum, he met the generals who were clinging to power with the help of troops using lethal force against protesters. He told the generals that Sudan needed to transition to civilian rule and “make sure that the human rights for all people of Sudan are the driving force behind this political process.”
Past U.N. high commissioners for human rights typically took some months in the Geneva lakeside headquarters of the U.N. human rights office to familiarize themselves with the complexities of the job before leaving for country visits. But Mr. Türk started arranging his Sudan visit before officially starting the job and is working on making one or two trips more before the end of the year. A mission to Ukraine is reportedly on his agenda.
His speed embracing the job points to the practical advantages he brings to the post as a U.N. insider familiar with the organization’s byzantine bureaucracy. Mr. Türk, 57, brings 30 years experience of working for the United Nations, first in its refugee agency — for which he visited Darfur 11 years ago — and then for the past three years working for the secretary general, António Guterres, in New York as a policy adviser, including on human rights.
Mr. Türk’s past as an insider, however, has contributed to the frosty response his appointment drew from international rights organizations. United Nations chiefs have in the past chosen former heads of government, eminent jurists or diplomatic heavyweights for the famously difficult human rights post, since the job requires courting world leaders and, at times, admonishing them for their human rights failings.
Mr. Türk, critics said, was unsuited by experience and temperament for such a delicate role. And his appointment by a U.N. secretary general perceived as weak on human rights stoked fears that Mr. Guterres had picked a quiet diplomat more likely to share his boss’s preference for back-room diplomacy than deploying the powerful weapon of public pressure.
But Mr. Türk’s steady stream of statements and comments in his first month on the job has given some doubters hope. On his second day in office, he condemned Ethiopian airstrikes on civilian targets in Tigray as “completely unacceptable.” After Elon Musk took over Twitter, Mr. Türk issued an open letter reminding the tech billionaire of the platform’s responsibility “to avoid amplifying content that results in harms to people’s rights.”