First, you must walk past the Palais de Chaillot, along the esplanade renamed in 1985 the Parvis des Droits-de-l’Homme, and settle into the cafe facing it. It is here, on December 10, 1948, that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted. The UN had just come into being, hadn’t yet secured a seat, and Robert Schuman, then foreign minister, had invited the General Assembly to Paris. While they had endured the worst, some had worked to build the best.
Our meeting place was chosen to go straight to the point. He arrives ten minutes late, escorted by his staff, his stride brisk as someone moving from one place to another.
“I go crazy when I eat a croissant in Paris.” The croissant appears with a double espresso, which he immediately has replaced by a café crème. He remains in front of it for a long moment, as if clinging to a promise he keeps to himself.
Volker Türk, an Austrian-trained jurist, is the eighth United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights since October 2022. He has just returned from Sudan. On June 11, he launched a Global Alliance for Human Rights. The world is aflame and new technologies threaten civilians as never before. Between his arrival and his departure, everything must be told.
How to name these rights
Türk speaks several languages. Today, it will be French, a precise and eloquent French, but where German occasionally surfaces in the syntax and where English surfaces when a concept eludes him. Watchdog, truth-telling process, crack of light. He translates afterward, smiles at being surprised.
We begin with the very title of his office, that French hesitation between “droits de l’homme” and “droits humains.” “In English, it’s human rights, so we avoid this problem. In Spanish too, derechos humanos. Diritti umani. Menschenrechte. Yes, it’s very French.” He looks at his croissant. “I prefer to say droits humains. I know that in French the term is very complicated, but the impression we have is that these rights are reduced to l’homme.”
He quickly turns to what truly concerns him: the idea that human rights dating from 1948 is a false claim. “This battle for fundamental freedoms is almost in humanity’s DNA. Sometimes people think it’s like international law and the Charter, but in fact it dates back to revolutions—the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, the American Revolution—as well as to the workers’ movement, feminism, the struggles against racism and apartheid. What the Universal Declaration accomplished was to solidify that wisdom in a document of extraordinary importance, which I continue to reference in my daily work.”
If Türk insists on laying out this genealogy, it is to cut off the suspicion that it is geographically and culturally over-determined. Is this an attempt to prevent the idea that human rights are a Western export that the rest of the world could revoke at will?
“I call it the politics of distraction.” He sets his cup down. “These are not only universal values but also a universal legal framework. They do have roots in the Enlightenment, but also in Africa, in Asia, in every religion, in every culture, in the Americas. We must view this from a historical perspective. And sometimes Europeans themselves make this mistake, speaking of European values.” These Western-import arguments, he says, “come from those who want to wield power and ignite cultural wars—but they are very easily countered.”
He cites the Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne, who theorized this lateral universalism. He cites René Cassin, one of the French drafters of the 1948 Declaration, who already defended a universalism based not on imposing a model, but on what unites human beings.
And one understands that the Global Alliance he has just launched is exactly designed to carry on this project: to gather philosophers from Africa, Asia, the Americas, the Arab world, because the struggle now takes place as much in minds as in tribunals.
He leans closer to the table and fixes us with his gaze. “We are facing a major intellectual and philosophical crisis. All too often there is a push to roll back, to return to an era even before the Enlightenment, on the separation of church and state, on questions of gender, on the protection of equality. We can never take anything for granted. The abolition of the death penalty. Already within European parliamentary debates there are those who are revisiting these questions. Gender equality—there are people who truly believe men can dominate women.”
War Has No Seasons
We have before us a jurist, an intellectual who clearly seeks to speak a language other than the one dictated by today’s crises and explosions.
Exactly, concretely, what does his day look like?
“It always begins in the morning with a briefing to review the situation around the world. I imagine it’s a bit like your newsroom: we ask what happened, what we can do, whether there are press releases, phone calls, meetings in Geneva.”
His office remains at the Palais Wilson, the old seat of the League of Nations. He will move soon, he tells us.
How does he set priorities in a world where more than forty conflicts and wars are ongoing?
“That’s a major challenge for us because you cannot rank them. If we don’t work on the big long-term challenges, we’ll end up with even more crises to manage.”
What particularly unsettles him, and it is not a signal flare: “The characteristics of these wars are grave violations of international humanitarian law. And we see that some states are trying to use their hostilities to recalibrate doctrine about the impact on civilians. They invoke military necessity, but we do not see that justification. We have seen this in Lebanon, Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, and earlier in Syria. Those who wage war push the boundaries of what is acceptable.”
I recall a conversation with the Sudanese Minister of Justice. I raised the issue of attacks on civilians in densely populated areas. He told me: ‘No, we give two hours’ warnings before the strike. And if people remain, that’s their fault. It’s war.’ He pauses. ‘That is completely unacceptable.’
In the face of this erosion, he states the formula that sums up his role better than any organizational chart: “My role is to be a persistent objector. So that these norms do not change. So that the protection of civilians and civilian infrastructure remains something that must be protected, even in a state of war.”
He returns to Sudan, where his office has documented an unprecedented shift in how warfare is conducted. “Civilian deaths this year are mostly due to drones. Normally, during the rainy season, there is less impact on civilians because fighting slows down. Now they continue.”
As I listen, I jot down in my notebook these words that have concerned me for some time: “War has no season.”
A crack of light
His stance on lethal autonomous weapons is clear: total prohibition. “We must halt the development of this kind of weapon,” he says. “Unfortunately, we don’t see that coming.”
And that is perhaps the whole point. Is it enough to be right in law when others hold power?
He understands the question, but he chooses a detour to answer it.
“I’ve interviewed many victims of the fall of Al-Fasher. It was mainly women, but also men. There was a very clear pattern: massacres, extrajudicial killings, mass rapes, abuses, torture. Vengeance for all those suspected of collaborating with the authorities.” He clarifies, for words carry legal meaning and he is a jurist: “These are crimes of atrocity.”
Al-Fasher, capital of Darfur-North, fell at the end of October 2025 to the Rapid Support Forces after an eighteen-month siege. He speaks in a very low, almost neutral voice, gazing at his cup. “These are people who endured nearly a year under a siege with nothing to eat. They began to eat peanut shells. The situation was unimaginable.”
And yet, he says, there is something else. “What gave me a great deal of hope is the enormous resilience in that population. There is a power in that population that I found truly striking.”
We return to his broadened genealogy of human rights: is revolution still possible?
The Sudanese Revolution of 2018-2019, which toppled the murderous Omar al-Bashir, “will return, I am absolutely convinced. Despite everything they are doing to the population, they could not kill that movement.”
He sees a clear sign in the energy of those presently working in the emergency rooms, these ultra-local humanitarian spaces. “It’s not the humanitarian industry, it’s really them on the ground, in solidarity with the population.”
That is a word he loves, and one that structures his work: “We will always try to find, I don’t know how to say it in French, the crack of light.”
The ray of light, they whisper to him.
“There you go. That’s a bit of our job. Where would there be a ray of light to go into that?”
The Anchor of the Law
The croissant is finally nibbled. He takes half in two bites, and drinks a sip of café crème.
He is the first jurist High Commissioner since Navi Pillay and Louise Arbour. His predecessor, Michelle Bachelet, was trained as a doctor. Does that change anything? Does it make him feel out of step in a world where the powerful derive their strength from their exemption from the law?
“Right now, it helps enormously.” He lays his flat hand on the table. “The law is our compass. It is an anchor for us. Being anchored in the law, knowing the arguments, knowing case law, helps enormously. Often I stand before an interlocutor who no longer has arguments. We have plenty.”
And at this moment in history, he says without flinching, “it’s better to be a jurist than a politician.”
That is also why he does not give up any case. Not even with the United States, which he publicly criticized several times over the past year and a half. “I spoke out publicly about what is happening in the United States regarding immigration policy, about deaths in deportation centers.” On American strikes against boats in the Caribbean, “more than two hundred, he says,” under the banner of an anti-narcotics war he deems legally baseless: “They use terms like narco-terrorism, but in these contexts that is not at all applicable.”
Horror and Liberation
Which regions concern him most on a planetary scale?
He begins by noting that Myanmar and Haiti are today the gravest forgotten crises, then continues: “The Middle East, for sure.” Gaza, whose humanitarian situation remains “extremely precarious.” The West Bank, “less in the media, but the situation is extremely grave” with Israeli settlers and government- and army-backed efforts to enlarge territories by force. Lebanon. Iran: “We talk about the Hormuz Strait, but we do not talk about the human rights situation for Iranians.”
On Israel and Palestine, he tells us he refuses the division of camps that has become the norm. “We are in a highly polarized situation. It is not a question of being pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian. It is a question of standing up for human rights on both sides.”
That’s the only moment in the interview when he talks about himself, about what the job costs. “Everything that happened on 7 October 2023, and after… I was often faced with people who did not see humanity in the other, on both sides. That dehumanization shocks me deeply. Not seeing the pain and suffering in the other.” He also refers, without hesitation, to “a ferocious propaganda from this Israeli government,” which attacked the International Criminal Court, UNRWA—the UN agency for Palestinian refugees—and, “unfortunately, us as well.”
Against despair, once more, he turns to history. “Europe’s lessons are very important. Germany and France after World War II—perhaps very difficult at first, and they managed to forge a very strong bond. And we must not forget that in 1975, at the heart of the Cold War, it was possible to sign the Helsinki Act,” one of the three baskets of measures centered on human rights. “Even in the Cold War, it was possible. We must never lose that hope.”
We ask whether he is occasionally weighed down by the symbolic heft of his office, whether he sometimes sees himself alone in the desert, shouting without being heard, facing the difficulty of delivering real change.
“For me, it’s a motor.” His reply is swift. Then he adds, as a self-correction: “Of course, one must be realistic. We are not messiahs or saviors. We do what we can.”
Then he gives a number that, at the moment, astonishes us. “We managed to secure the release of almost five thousand people arbitrarily detained last year. We influence legislation, policies, to bring them into line with human rights in many countries.” And this almost-whispered conclusion: “If this work weren’t done, we would be living in a far more chaotic world.”
He looks at the table. He looks out the window at the deserted esplanade, tourists pushing toward the Eiffel Tower view, not noticing the name of the parvis that sustains them. It’s not really a metaphor.
The Stronger’s Reason
I’d like to return to the question of force and law.
Should we make concessions and, if so, on what grounds? Since China has become a major power, few institutions or parties dare address the issue of the country’s concentrationary infrastructure and its mass surveillance strategy.
Volker Türk is clear: “Human rights aren’t a menu you can pick from. We must not make exceptions, even when confronted with a power that is large.”
The line is clear, but is it heard? He knows the criticisms of the UN—powerlessness, double standards, hypocrisy—by heart.
“It has become fashionable to attack us, to darken the UN system. I always find it very interesting to hear some great powers say: the United Nations should solve all problems of peace and security. Yet those same states do exactly the opposite. Russia is a good example. But the United States as well, with what happened in Iran, and earlier in Iraq. If they commit violations themselves, then it is very hard to turn around and say: we provide the solution.”
He searches for the precise French expression and lands on it: “It’s throw out the baby with the bathwater.” It’s a bit of a distraction. And a disappointment, too, for us.
For conflicts, he notes, are chiefly the responsibility of the member states. We cannot do much if the member states themselves claim a double standard in applying the Charter. Our role is to highlight that there can be no exceptions.
Rather than argument by abstraction, he offers scenes.
That mass grave in Sri Lanka: “There were hundreds and hundreds of people waiting for me, because they hoped we would push the government to uncover what happened to their disappeared relatives. That is something only the United Nations can do.”
That defender of human rights detained in Khartoum, on his first visit to Sudan in November 2022: “They told me, no, that wasn’t possible. I insisted. I managed to see him. I asked General al-Burhan to release him. He did so two weeks later.” He adds, soberly: “That is a great pride.”
There is even, in his arsenal, an argument we did not expect and that lands squarely in 2026 America, the one about markets: “I see more and more companies taking this seriously. Because for them, predictability matters. Stability does not come from a chaotic world. Stability comes from a legal framework based on the rule of law and human rights.”
The rights of peoples argued in shareholder language: the objector knows his counterparts.
We press him on the Security Council and he becomes unusually political. “The Human Rights Council is not the Security Council. But the Security Council should play its role much more, especially when there are crimes against humanity.” And he gestures toward Paris. “There is a Franco-Mexican initiative I find very important, to avoid using the veto in matters of atrocity prevention. I believe this is an initiative that should be supported.”
Meanwhile, the croissant has vanished.
Everyone, Everywhere
And after the mandate? He waves off the question. “We don’t have time to think about that.”
He finishes his café crème; time is tight, his cabinet begins to worry.
We pose the ritual question of this series: what should one listen for as one reads this interview?
His face brightens suddenly. “I’m a devotee of classical music.”
And the answer comes, without hesitation: Everyone, Everywhere, the cantata by American composer Daron Hagen, commissioned for the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration and premiered at Carnegie Hall in December 2023. “It’s contemporary classical music, very powerful — it uses the UDHR, but also the words of Eleanor Roosevelt and Gandhi.”
He stands, thanks. His staff rises with him. We watch them stride across the square, hurried silhouettes among tourists who photograph the Eiffel Tower’s spectacle without glances for the name of the forecourt that lets them endure. It isn’t really a metaphor.