In October 2025, I had the opportunity to attend the 24th Session of the Intergovernmental Working Group on the Effective Implementation of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action, or DDPA, in Geneva through the University of Minnesota Law School Human Rights Center. The Working Group was discussing how to advance the DDPA while continuing work on a draft UN declaration on the human rights of people of African descent. Much of my time there involved discussion, dissent, and negotiation, but what I had not fully appreciated before being in the room was how much those conversations could turn on language.

I watched governments work through sentences, phrases, and sometimes individual terms in the draft declaration. From the outside, that level of attention to wording might seem overly exacting, but inside the room, its significance was much easier to understand. Language helps determine which harms are recognized, how rights are framed, and what governments and institutions may later be asked to act on.

That became especially clear as the negotiations unfolded. Delegations often shared a broad commitment to addressing racial discrimination while still disagreeing over how that commitment should be expressed in the text. A discussion could begin with a general principle and then narrow to a definition, a phrase, or a particular formulation, because each choice carried consequences for what the final language would recognize and how it might later be used.

Why language matters

The DDPA was adopted in 2001 at the World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa. It created an international framework for confronting racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance, but its implementation remains unfinished.

That unfinished work helps explain why wording matters. Before governments can respond to an injustice, they have to recognize and describe it. Before advocates can argue that institutions have fallen short, they need standards against which those institutions can be judged. International human rights language helps structure both of these processes.

This is why questions that initially sound technical can have practical consequences. How should a particular harm be described? What does equality require in practice? Should a commitment be framed narrowly or broadly? Whose experiences need to be named directly in the text?

A declaration does not automatically change the law, and the DDPA itself is not a legally binding treaty. Still, international standards can shape how governments, institutions, advocates, and communities understand injustice and what they expect should be done about it.

I came to understand that process through a fairly simple progression:

• Recognition: Name the harm and acknowledge the people experiencing it.
• Standards: Build shared expectations for how governments and institutions should respond.
• Action: Turn those expectations into laws, policies, remedies, and accountability.

The difficulty is moving from one stage to the next.

Who shapes the conversation?

Geneva also complicated the image I had of international diplomacy as simply governments talking to other governments. States remain central to the process, but the broader conversation also includes civil society organizations, researchers, legal experts, universities, advocates, and people with direct knowledge of discrimination.

That participation matters because inequality is not experienced in the abstract. It appears in housing, schools, workplaces, healthcare, access to land and finance, and encounters with public institutions. Those experiences do not always reach governments easily, so international forums can create another route for them to enter the discussion.

They also allow countries with different legal systems, histories, and political contexts to learn from one another. No country arrives with a perfect solution, and that is part of the value of the exchange. One delegation may have confronted a problem that another is only beginning to recognize. A policy that worked in one place may offer lessons elsewhere, while a failed approach can be equally instructive.

International dialogue, then, is not only about reaching agreement. It is also about comparison, learning, and the gradual development of shared standards for problems that take different forms across national contexts.

What happens after Geneva

The limits of that process are just as important.

Eventually, the session ends, and even carefully negotiated language still has to survive the much harder process of implementation. A stronger declaration does not by itself change a school, a courtroom, a housing market, or a person's daily life.

Implementation still depends on governments, legislatures, courts, institutions, resources, civil society, and continued advocacy. The DDPA's ongoing follow-up mechanisms exist in part because adopting a principle and realizing it are two different things.

That is the tension I carried home from Geneva. I became more aware of the limits of international dialogue, but also less willing to dismiss it as merely symbolic. The language developed in those rooms can travel into reports, policies, legal arguments, advocacy campaigns, and public debate. It can give governments something to answer for and give advocates standards to point to. Sometimes, it can also give people language for an injustice they have experienced long before an institution was prepared to name it.

That does not mean better language is the same thing as better protection. It is not.

But language is often where recognition begins, where shared standards are negotiated, and where future claims become possible. The harder task is making sure those commitments do not just remain in Geneva.

The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this blog are the author’s only and do not reflect an official position of the University of Minnesota, the Human Rights Program, or the College of Liberal Arts. As an institution of higher education that values and promotes free speech, civil discourse, and human rights, we welcome a variety of perspectives and opinions from our student contributors that are consistent with these values.