Geneva, February 27th, 2026 – “As faith leaders we need to be more self-critical of our own religious traditions instead of pointing fingers against others,” ECI Founding Director Tomas Sandell said as he spoke at the symposium “The role of Faith communities in addressing religious intolerance”, co-hosted by the World Jewish Congress and European Coalition for Israel at the sidelines of the High-level Week of the 61st session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on Thursday afternoon.

Sandell went on to explain that “this has been the guiding principle for European Coalition for Israel for the last 25 years as we have examined the role of the Christian church during centuries of persecution of Jews leading up to the Holocaust. There were no protests from Christian leaders during the Evian conference in 1938 when the nations refused to receive Jewish refugees from Nazi occupied areas in Europe, thus giving Hitler the green light for his genocidal plans. Neither were there any protests at the time of the Wannsee conference in Berlin in 1942 which planned the coordination of the final solution, the systematic murder of six million Jews.”

“Also today we need to remain vigilant as Russia continues its full-scale aggression against Ukraine, in a war which Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church has called a Holy War against Ukraine and the West. Who would have thought that the bloodiest war on European soil after the Second World War would be a Holy War between one Christian nation against another? This, if anything, calls for critical introspection for those of us who call ourselves Christians,” Tomas Sandell said.

Pointing out the double standards at the UN Human Rights Council, he asked why it took so long for the UN body to condemn the Hamas terrorist attack on 7 October 2023 or the brutal crackdown on the peaceful Iranian demonstrators by the Islamic Republic which over a period of only 40 days killed tens of thousands of civilian Iranians. Meanwhile Iran was appointed deputy-chair of the UN Committee of Social Development illustrating the absurdity of the current state of the United Nations which caused one of the UN ambassadors present in the symposium to ask the faith leaders to ‘please pray for the UN Human Rights Council.’

In his intervention Archbishop Thomas Schirrmacher, who is the chair of the International Society for Human Rights, explained how the moral fabric of a society does not come from politics but from religion. This is why it is important that the religious leaders never call for violence but for co-existence and respect for human dignity. It is up to the faith leaders to tackle extremism in their own camp. This is something which the elected political leaders cannot do but only the religious leaders themselves.

Swami Vedanishthananda from the Vedantic centre in Geneve received applauds when he suggested that we go from co-existence to co-flourishing, pointing out that we should not only tolerate each other’s existence but rather celebrate this diversity of thoughts and convictions. “We have to take the interfaith dialogue out of the conference rooms and into the streets by serving our communities together,” he said.

The symposium was moderated by Leon Saltiel of the World Jewish Congress and included additional interventions from Chief Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt of the Conference of European Rabbis (by video), Ambassador David Fernandez Puyana, the Permanent Representative of the University of Peace to the UN in Geneva, Mohammed Levrak of the Geneva Interreligious Platform and with concluding remarks from Michael Wiener from the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.