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07 September 2021 Italy will not participate in the World Conference against Racism which will take place on 22 September in New York on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly.
An appointment that, 20 years after the first edition in 2001, will be deserted by many Western countries after the controversies of recent months on the fact that the Unesco intergovernmental conference risks turning into an anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli summit as already happened in previous events .
The countries that have already decided to boycott, in addition to Italy, are the USA, Canada, Australia, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Austria, Holland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and of course Israel. All countries that have already boycotted the 2011 edition, in New York, and many of those who have also deserted the 2009 edition in Geneva.
A troubled life, that of the Conference, which began in 2001, when in the first meeting in Durban, South Africa, Israel was defined as a "racist and apartheid state" and the Conference was transformed into an indictment against the State Hebrew with the distribution, among other things, of anti-Semitic materials such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The situation was repeated in 2009 with an anti-Israel show by the then Iranian president Mahmud Ahmadinejad, the only leader to take the stage. On that occasion, which was boycotted by Italy, the European Union split with the exit from the hall of the 23 EU ministers present. Instead, France remained, but represented only at ambassador level, to "make another voice heard, that of tolerance and responsibility".
In 2011, Italy confirmed the boycott of the Durban tenth anniversary celebrations because, in the words of the then Foreign Minister Franco Frattini, "the minimum conditions for participating in the event do not exist". And Paris also took off: a position reconfirmed by President Emmanuel Macron who in mid-August reiterated his absence from the French Conference, shocked by the no-vax demonstrations that compared the health pass to the Shoah. "France will continue to fight against all forms of racism and will ensure that the Durban conference is held in compliance with the founding principles of the United Nations", the Elysée specified in a note in mid-August.
"The Durban Conference has been and continues to be used to promote anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic attitudes," said Canadian Foreign Ministry spokesman Grantly Franklin, announcing his country's non-participation. However, states such as Bulgaria, New Zealand and Poland, which were not present in 2011, have not yet expressed their opinion.