Every year on this date, 2 October 2024, the world commemorates the International Day of Non Violence, which was established by the United Nations General Assembly in its resolution 61/271 of 15 June 2007, as an occasion to disseminate the culture of peace, tolerance, understanding and non-violence.
Alkarama believes that it is difficult to promote and protect human rights in a climate of violence and notes with regret that Arab countries suffer from various forms of violence, including direct violence that threatens human life and physical integrity, structural violence that prevents people from enjoying their basic needs and fundamental rights to achieve a decent life, and cultural violence that legitimizes manifestations of injustice.
The Palestinian people is suffering from direct extreme violence in the form of an all-out war waged by the Israeli occupation army and armed settler militias, a violence that has also affected for the past two weeks civilians in Lebanon in violation of international law, while the peoples of Sudan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and Syria suffer from devastating internal wars, led by factions with narrow regional, sectarian and ideological interests and controlled by regional and international powers.
Most other Arab countries also suffer from structural violence perpetrated by corrupt and illegitimate authoritarian regimes that close the political space, suppress freedoms, prevent their citizens from enjoying their basic rights, including freedom of expression, assembly and political participation, and cause high levels of poverty, ignorance, crime and social backwardness.
Some cultural and religious elites loyal to authoritarian regimes seek to legitimize the policies and practices of these regimes through dull rhetoric and false arguments that have nothing to do with Arab traditions and religious teachings that promote the values of justice and dignity and reject slavery in all its forms.
For two decades, Alkarama has worked to reduce and prevent direct violence in the Arab world, to urge adherence to non-violent means of struggle in the face of violence by the authorities, to defend victims of extrajudicial execution, enforced disappearance, torture, and arbitrary detention, and to bring their voices to international human rights mechanisms in an effort to build states where all individuals enjoy justice, freedom and security under the protection of the law.