Skopje, 18 August 2021 (MIA) - The Helsinki Committee for Human Rights has voiced concern that the Afghanistan crisis could be misused ahead of the local elections, and urged the media, and especially politicians, not to spark xenophobia among the citizens in order to achieve certain political goals. The humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan and the government’s decision to temporarily accommodate Afghan refugees has been followed by intense hate speech and attempts to spread xenophobia. The Helsinki Committee points out that refugee and migrant misinformation has been omnipresent in public discourse over the past few years, especially during the migrant crisis in 2015-2017. “Although the reality of the situation fully rebuffed fake news about the housing of hundreds of thousands of migrants and building refugee camps, the hatred was maintained continuously and is on the rise again nowadays,” the Helsinki Committee says in a statement. “Such abuse of people’s fates, people fleeing to save their lives because they risk death in their own country, goes against the international conventions that we are obligated to follow as a country, such as the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, also known as the Geneva Convention, and the European Convention on Human Rights, as well as going against basic moral principles of standing in solidarity with those whose rights have been taken away, and their existence has been directly jeopardized,” says the statement. The Committee adds it will closely monitor developments on the ground, noting its experts will offer legal support for the 450 humanitarian workers, civil rights activists, journalists, translators and their families, who will be accepted into this country and housed into hotels. “The Committee is keeping track of xenophobic speech among the public and will be actively reporting hate speech to the authorities,” it says. dk/ba/