A/HRC/40/72 the Committee had raised his confidence in carrying out his project. He encouraged support for youth initiatives as a way of advancing the Sustainable Development Goals. 48. Marion Keim, Director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Sports Science and Development, University of the Western Cape, South Africa, argued that promoting peace and development through sports required assessing realities, including through mapping exercises. Peace and violence correlated among other things to income, schooling, regional integration, transparency and corruption. Youth had more opportunities in the global North, while in the global South there were challenges including in health, education and research. Sport should help bridge the North-South gap and promote sustainable development and sustained peace, and, to this end, investment at the grass-roots level was essential. Ms. Keim encouraged a values-based sports education to promote sustainable development and peace, in school curricula, taking into account universal, Olympic and Paralympic values. To avoid adverse effects on certain groups, coordinated efforts should link sports, peace and development through the Kazan Action Plan and regular international dialogue. In concluding, Ms. Keim called for capacity-building, youth network-building, and monitoring of policies. 49. The outreach manager of the Institute for Human Rights and Business, Guido Battaglia, explained that the Institute hosted the Centre for Sport and Human Rights, a multi-stakeholder initiative aimed at sharing knowledge, building bidding capacity and strengthening accountability. A 2018 report by the Centre had mapped the use of human rights principles by partnerships in disadvantaged areas to deliver projects on sport for development and peace. Few programmes acknowledged due diligence responsibilities in accordance with the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Integrating human rights due diligence would help build trust among stakeholders, prevent, mitigate, identify and remedy adverse impacts, and harness positive impacts of sport-based programmes. Programmes should align with the principles of non-discrimination, participation, rule of law, consent, accountability and good governance. Mr. Battaglia cited, as a good practice, cooperation between UNESCO and the Commonwealth Secretariat to align the implementation of the Kazan Action Plan with the Sustainable Development Goals. The Centre for Sport and Human Rights could play a key role in facilitating collective action to promote human rights through sports. 50. Shannon Galpin, author, activist and founder of the Mountain2Mountain non-profit organization, shared her decade-long experience as a women’s rights activist in Afghanistan. When she arrived in the country, women were starting to engage in sports, but riding bicycles was still taboo. Bicycles facilitated access to schools and health care and reduced gender-based violence rates. Ms. Galpin had helped a group of women cyclists to progress on the right to ride in the country and to promote the first national women’s team. The latter had attracted extensive media attention and high-level participation, and had even been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, becoming a source of national pride. This had helped to normalize cycling among Afghan women. Bicycles thereby became tools not only for development, but also for sustained peace and social justice. 51. During the interactive dialogue, the Chair-Rapporteur and representatives of the Commonwealth Secretariat, the International Paralympic Committee, the National Olympic Committee of Kenya, Association Le Pont, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and World Indigenous Nations Sports International took the floor. A delegate asked panellists how to foster international cooperation, transfer of technologies and collective action, in order to promote the human rights of youth, sustainable development and peace with social justice, in line with the Declaration on the Right to Development. Another participant considered the Declaration on the Right to Development to be a tool to nurture the interlinkages between peace, development and human rights, to advance on them all. Participants made recommendations regarding indicators, including the adoption of a human rights-based approach to indicators, integrating human rights indicators with those related to sustainable development in sports, and formulating indicators to assess the impact of adaptive sports in the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Others recommended the pursuit of reconciliation through sports, an agenda for peacebuilding in conflict-affected areas, integrating climate and environmental action in projects, and promoting unity among the youth of the world. 14

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