 we can make a choice for human rights or not. In fact, it's why we can make a choice to be on what I consider to be one side or the other or the way we decide to lead our lives. Since I was a child, I could observe that somehow society is divided. And whatever I was taught, including that university is divided into two areas. One is social, the other one is profit. And there is this tension. There is this tension, we find it in any forms of learning in any form of exposure that we have. But at a certain point, there are things that happen to you and possibilities and sensibility. And everyone has got its own journey to decide to take something, they are really understanding us, to give a certain meaning to life as compared to something else. Very often, this is due to personal experiences. In my case, I had a loss in my family and it was my niece. And then my second nephew, he also had a problem and he had to be rushed to a hospital for surgery. He was able to be treated without what the technology could offer at the time in the medical science. And he's alive now, he's a happy father of three kids himself. But as I was in this hospital and I was really worried for him because I'd already lost my niece, was looking around me and looking at my nephew and saying he's got a chance, he's going to make it. But then your mind goes to all the children who do not have this thing. And then you start asking yourself, why is it that some of us have opportunities and other people don't? And I think out of this sense of inequality, out of this sense of unfairness, because that's about it, is unfairness. It's not fair that you're born in a certain place, you're born with a certain family, loving family as compared to an abusive family. You're born in a rich country as compared to a poor country. You're born in a free environment as compared to in an oppressive environment. And that determines your life. As I was wondering what I would do with my life and I was considering that perhaps I should completely change my trajectory, at a certain point I had thinking and thinking hard is what is that I like about law? And what I liked about law is again the general principles. I liked some parts of the philosophy of law. I liked constitutional and public law because it's public. It belongs to everyone as compared to private, where I see that there is more this sense of exclusion and privilege entrenched in the law at times. And I liked the international law. International human rights law fascinated me because everything is about us. It's about the individual. It's about the person who has not. It is about making us believe that we can be equal. It's about ethics. It's about as to paraphrase, about to use or be inspired by former deputy secretary General Eliasen is about the world as it should be. And that's what the United Nations are all about. Working for human rights is not easy. It's not always easy because we face many frustrations but in the meantime we are driven by the conviction we're doing something helpful that hopefully is going to be helpful to all the people. I began being associated with non-governmental organizations and that was based in Hong Kong, which at the time was still a colony. And there was a regional organization that gave me the opportunity to travel, to live in solidarity with people who were really excluded from society, whether it is India, whether it is Africa, whether it is Western countries because you have the same thing here. There are people who really live at the margin of society. We walk around misery and we don't see it. We walk around exploitation. We don't see it. Living in Geneva, you seem to live in a place which is a very beautiful place. It's got everything for everybody you think. And then COVID comes. And then I take my kids for a walk along the river, and there was a food distribution point. And here is this long queue, more than a kilometer long, of people queuing up for food here in Geneva, which is one of the richest places on earth. People were queuing up for food and there were not the people you would expect, were not the people you expect to sleep in the streets, were family with kids. They were elderly couples. I mean, there are people who are not taking care of even in these societies. This is what human rights is all about. Then human rights is also something else. Human rights is trying to fight against violence. It's trying to fight against unnecessary killings. It's to fight against societal crisis. It's to fight against systems. After serving in Hong Kong, I had the opportunity, I went back to Italy. And I was still before joining the United Nations and I joined the Italian sector of the international campaign against landmines. That was a very exciting experience because there was one lesson that I learned, but also because we were just working on something that made so much sense, landmines. Why do we use landmines? In terms of military use, there is a use but the consequences of planting landmines were so obvious in 1992 when Cambodia, at a certain point, was occupied by the United Nations with the peace operation. Became obvious to everyone that the previous conflict had disseminated landmines. And those landmines were floating every time there was a flood in a country which being in Macon Delta is very often flooded and then moving. So every time there were so many children, workers, women, men, elderly, that had limbs amputated because of the stepping on landmines months and years after those have been planted that you really wonder whether you could make a military argument for the use of this. What I learned from the campaign was that one is that to bring something home you need to have a very clear, simple message. And that is the reason why that campaign really made a difference. Because landmine skills are in the discriminatory and the simple message was do away with landmines. There was success. I mean, for once, we in Italy felt that there had been a contribution. Italy had been a big contributor to the, I mean, producer landmines and changed its production at the time. The campaign won the Nobel Prize, which I think was, I feel very proud in a sense of having been associated to that. That provided me with a sense that something that you think is too big, first of all, can be undone and also there can be recognition for it. For us in human rights, when we look at conflict, in addition to the big picture, we look at people. I've been out in many places. Again, my career started in 94. I arrived in early September 94 in Rwanda. A country that had been devastated by a, still, in my opinion, underreported and underrecognized genocide. Because what that genocide proved is that, is that everyone can become a killer. That's what I saw in Rwanda. And I want to use this to explain another concept. Because what had happened in Rwanda, this 800,000-plus people, nobody will ever know the exact amount of people being killed by their neighbors. People were there together and possibly celebrating and talking to one another. Out of intoxication, all of a sudden, something went wrong in people's mind and they started killing one another. There was no place. I was in what was called sector five in the north-west of Rwanda. And there was no septic tank. The villages had houses with septic tanks because the way it works in the toilets, you know, there is no sewage system. Every septic tank had a corpse inside. This is what genocide was about. It's something that you cannot see. You cannot understand unless you've been there. So I think that what we need to retain from these lessons, from the lessons learned in the period when I worked in Formula E, it was like, again, neighbors were turning to enemies and killers. The sniper that was on the roof was the friend or the colleague just a couple of years before. There is something that can go wrong in human minds. But there is, here again, we cannot be prescriptive because there is another thing. We sometimes equate human rights and accountability with good people and bad people. It is never just as simple as that. If we talk about working in conflict situations, we see that there is a centrality of action for the United Nations that for the time being has not been replaced, but for anyone else within which human rights has got a significant role to play. Intervening in conflict very often has been equated and things are changing, but has been equated with the Department of Peacekeeping Operations. The United Nations starting getting involved in conflict in the early 60s, really at the beginning of the existence of the organization has grown over the years. And in the 90s, in particular, in the early year 2000, there has been this explosion of peace operations. Initially, the idea was to interpose forces to stop conflicts, to create truces and allow peace being discussed and therefore find peaceful solutions to conflict. There's been an evolution and at a certain point, missions became bigger and they started integrating more and more human rights. I've had the opportunity to serve in a couple of peace operations, including as chief human rights. And I've seen how human rights is central to addressing conflict and to conflict resolution. And within this, what is extremely important is to try to understand what happens. When there is a conflict, there is, all of a sudden, a complete loss of confidence in between the people and authorities, in between people and the fighting elements. And that is something that United Nations needs to be very attentive to. Working for human rights is an issue. The contrary to what a quick reading of human rights work could suggest is all about confidence building. Being able to monitor what happens on the ground, being able to be food on the ground and talking to people and understanding what their fears are, understanding what is happening, understanding and reporting what the abuses are, give an opportunity to authorities then when authorities are failed to the peace operation to step and respond to what are the rightful demands of people. What human rights have got to offer in any given situation, but particularly in conflict situation, is that we talk to people. People are our constituency. The old concept of protection of civilians of war is a byproduct, if you wish, of our work on human rights. Because thanks to the work that has been done over the years, there was this recognition that contrary to what the international humanitarian law prescribes, very often the principle of proportionality is completely neglected. And the people who are going to suffer are the villagers, are the people who are caught in between crossfire. So the work we do in terms of early warning, very often it is a very early stage and what we do through what we call the emergency response team is to start to integrate in the thinking and the planning of the United Nations on the ground, elements that will allow to address whether it is economic, social exclusion, cultural exclusion or sometimes political exclusion issues that are not particularly at the forefront. We had a situation which I would really consider as one of the success stories in terms of prevention and that is the poll back in 2005. We had Thangris Canal, so we had a senior human rights advisor on the ground and we saw that there was the tail end of a monarchy. I was in the very early stage involved in setting up the particular operation and conceptualizing it. And the fact that we were able to have people in a country that was ready to have that sort of intervention. We had colleagues that participated in the many demonstrations that were happening, talking to the law enforcement officers, talking to the organizers, talking to the demonstrators, being very visible on the ground, avoided, in my opinion and I think possibly in everyone's opinion, that those demonstrations could be suppressed in blood because it could have happened. Nothing is perfect, but it could be seen that an early intervention of an external actress in this case, the officer of the High Commission for Human Rights could contribute to peace. During conflict, very often people go missing, they are underreported and no one knows exactly what has happened to them. The families of the missing, however, continue to look for them. There is the history of the, you know, the Al-Azabuelas, the Plaza de Mayo, you know, the struggle in Latin America to figure out what had happened to the missing, what happened to the children that were taken forcibly away from family and given into adoption. This, in my experience, happens not just in Latin America. Some people think it's cultural, but it is not cultural. It happens in any given society. You know, it's a little bit saying what I heard sometimes people say and this is so ridiculous. Some people, once I heard someone say an African mother suffers less because the likelihood of losing her child is so much higher. Can anyone be so dumb and believe that we human beings have different feelings? So the issue of the missing is something that I have to deal with in any given society. And it was very unfortunate that, whereas for me it was that I had received so much effort and attention to identify the missing person, the same effort didn't go into what had happened in Rwanda. Or I was working in Afghanistan and back in the late 90s and early 2000s, people were demanding to know what had happened to them. And then there was the huge national lawyer, Jacob, and unfortunately the warlords were he admitted because otherwise the pathway that the Afghans, I'd been talking to had planned for themselves was the one of national reconciliation through acknowledgement of the people who had gone missing. Giving them a name, and unfortunately what we see more and more now recently is that we give them statistics. These are X number of people are being killed, but we don't say who these people are. Human rights is about the right to know. The families have the right to know what happened to them. Apart from that, there are also many other issues that are offsprings of the non-recognition that people have gone missing. People sometimes forget that depending on the legal framework within which you operate, you may lose settlements because sometimes there is no the presumption of death that is recognized as the national women cannot remarry. Inheritance rights are without, tenancy rights are without, but particularly people have got the right to know what happened. We all need role models. We all need heroes. Now some of the heroes no longer, I mean I would never be recognized because I are the ordinary people. And some of them are the people I've met. Some of them, sometimes when you do human rights, you meet with people and you say, what you're doing is dangerous, are you sure? And people say, this is my country, this is my destiny, this is my family, I know what I'm doing. And I don't care about the risk. These are the real heroes, but also there are people who can make a difference. I've had the chance of working with with Ina Jilani, I've had the chance of working with Sergio Vieira de Mello, I've had the opportunity to work with William Leslie Swing, Bill Swing for many. And I can tell you, there are people who really, really believe in what they do. There are people who are approachable. The beauty, and you see what is the characteristics of these people. These are people with whom I've shared hours and I've shared filled situations or whatever. These are the people who recognize the same dignity to the person whose work was simply to be the driver or the cleaner as to the president. And that's where you see the difference. People believe in people, they make the difference. These are my heroes.