“We recognize the signs, we sound the alarm, but yet abuses continue to be committed and populations suffer the consequences,” Adama Dieng told the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.

Addressing the 47-member body’s current session, Mr. Dieng said that genocide, unfortunately, is not a crime that has been relegated to the past.

“Despite the tragedy of the Holocaust, the killing fields of Cambodia, the genocides in Rwanda and Srebrenica and many other incidents of massive human rights violations, we still seem not to have learned our lesson,” he stated.

“In the face of the atrocities that are being committed still today, and our failure to prevent or halt their escalation, we must conclude that we have failed to fulfil our promise of ‘never again’.”

At a summit of world leaders in 2005, Member States adopted the principle of the responsibility to protect, sometimes known as ‘R2P,’ which holds countries responsible for shielding their own populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and related crimes against humanity and requires the international community to step in if this obligation is not met.

In his role as Special Adviser, Mr. Dieng acts as a catalyst to raise awareness of the causes and dynamics of genocide, to alert relevant actors where there is a risk of genocide, and to advocate and mobilize for appropriate action.

“Today, we are witnessing a dangerous increase in ethnic and religious tensions in various regions and have seen extreme violence in countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Kyrgyzstan, Mali, Myanmar, Pakistan, Sudan, and Syria, to name just a few,” he told the Council.

“While we cannot correct the failures of the past, we can at least learn from them and strive to create mechanisms that can help us prevent these atrocities from happening again.”

While he recognized the many important initiatives that the Council has already taken, Mr. Dieng said the UN’s main human rights body must continue to find ways to consistently address the present and future crises that pose serious threats to populations.

As much as possible, the Council should endeavour to anticipate and effectively engage at an early stage to pre-empt the escalation of tensions into potentially genocidal violence, he noted.

The report describes a gloomy situation for the country. According to the report:

“Young people have been hit especially hard by the crisis. Youth unemployment ended at 45% in the third quarter of 2011 (48% in November 2011), twice as high as two years ago. Young people are also contributing especially heavily to the increase in long-term unemployment. In the third quarter of 2011, some 45% of the unemployed aged 15 to 24 were long-term unemployed, against 30% two years earlier.

Access to life-long learning is far below the EU average, for all age groups. Just 3% of the active population participated in education or training in 2010, compared with 9% at EU level. 7% of young adults between 25 and 34 participated in education or training, against 15% at EU level. At the other end of their active life, adults between 55 and 64 also show a very low participation rate: 0.5% against 4.5% for the EU.

Gross disposable household income decreased by 9.3% in 2010. Income losses have been far greater for the rich than for the poor in absolute terms. However, in relative terms (i.e. as a proportion of their income), lower-income groups suffered a significant loss of income. Households in the bottom quintile (i.e. the poorest 20% of the population) lost an estimated 9% of their income, compared with 11% for households in the top quintile.

The overall at-risk-of-poverty or social exclusion rate for the total population stood at 27.7% in 2010, higher than the EU27 average of 23.4%. The risk-of-poverty (income-poor) rate was 20.1% in 2010, following an increase from 19.7% in 2009, whereas the EU average is 16.4%. The risk of poverty for children (23.0%) is higher than the EU average, which stood at 20.6% in 2010.

The in-work poverty rate in Greece was the second highest in the EU in 2010. Besides low earnings, in-work poverty depends on the employment status of all members of the household and on the availability and adequacy of social transfers, including in-work benefits. The household work intensity (measuring the degree to which all members of the household realise their full labour market potential) in Greece is one of the lowest in the EU, essentially due to the lower labour market participation by women. Tax credits/rebates and benefits for low-wage workers are less common in Greece than in other Member States and are often much lower.”