A/HRC/39/24 I. Introduction 1. On 21 and 22 February 2018, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) organized, pursuant to Human Rights Council resolution 33/6, an expert workshop to discuss the role and contribution of civil society organizations, academia, national human rights institutions and other relevant stakeholders in the prevention of human rights abuses. As requested by the Human Rights Council, the expert workshop drew on the conclusions and recommendations of the OHCHR study on the role of prevention in the promotion and protection of human rights (A/HRC/30/20). 2. Representatives of 31 States, 20 civil society organizations, 10 national human rights institutions, 2 intergovernmental organizations and 2 United Nations entities, and 3 treaty body committee members, 3 academics and 1 Special Rapporteur, attended the expert workshop in Geneva. II. Opening statement 3. In her opening remarks, the United Nations Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights emphasized that people must be put at the heart of prevention and human rights must be put at the heart of society. In this, the focus must be inclusive of all, and sensitive to economic, social and cultural rights, not just civil and political rights. With regard to the meaning of the term “prevention”, she pointed to the approach of public health professionals who use the idea of different levels of prevention as building blocks of a holistic approach. Primary prevention efforts address root causes — stopping the problem before it occurs and making reoccurrence less likely. Secondary prevention focuses on a rapid response to the earliest signs — seeking to minimize early impacts and taking measures necessary to make recovery sustainable and escalation improbable. Tertiary prevention aims to minimize harm once the problem is in full flight. The fourth level, primordial prevention, focuses preventive efforts more squarely on establishing and maintaining conditions that minimize future threats and maximize conditions that are antithetical to that which is being prevented. 4. She argued that efforts to prevent human rights abuses had focused on tertiary and late-secondary responses, with too little effort globally on primary prevention of the root causes, which included the socioeconomic drivers of injustice and conflict. From a human rights perspective, the prevention discourse should not be a question only of mainstreaming human rights into the peace and security agenda, but also of mainstreaming human rights into the development agenda. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, implemented with a human rights-based approach, could enable the Sustainable Development Goals to improve the situation for all. Furthermore, she noted that the guidelines and standards developed by the Human Rights Council, and the recommendations of other human rights mechanisms, such as those of the universal periodic review, were important tools but would need greater efforts for their implementation. Finally, she called for a focus on primordial prevention that would establish and maintain conditions which minimized future threats and maximized patterns that were antithetical to human rights erosion over the longer term. In that context, she stressed the importance of convincing and engaging young people, because if we did not win their trust and conviction, then prevention efforts would ultimately fail. 5. She highlighted the crucial and irreplaceable, but often underestimated, contribution that civil society organizations, academia, national human rights institutions and other relevant stakeholders made in the prevention of human rights abuses. She stressed that, while orthodox models of conflict prevention had been rooted in militarization and securitization, civil society was a key actor in finding solutions for non-militarized longterm solutions founded on human rights, good governance and sustainable inclusive 2