29 October 2025

Opening remarks of Christina Meinecke, Regional Representative for Europe

Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR)

Dear partners and colleagues,

It is a great pleasure to open this year’s gathering — the third in our collective journey to address the nexus between racism and health. I am grateful for our continuous collaboration with the European Public Health Alliance, and its Anti-discrimination and Health Equity Network organizations (DisQo Network).

Our partnership commenced in 2023 to analyse, raise awareness and address racism in health and racism’s impact on health. Our joint efforts have resulted in a series of recommendations submitted to the European Commission in the context of the 2026-2030 EU Anti-Racism Strategy elaboration. I am recognizing the impact of our efforts to open spaces for exchange on these topics with civil society, victims, academics and public officials.

I am pleased to count each year on the increasing support and collaboration with civil society and this year we are delighted to launch the third annual conference-workshop with PAD Belgium Observatory. Tomas de Jong from the European Public Health Alliance will present in greater detail the origins and outcome of our collaboration.

So, I will limit myself to recall that in the past two years,

• we verbalized and raised awareness on the right to health as a right to physical and mental health.
• we explored the measurable, documented impacts of racism on the mind and body: hypertension, depression, anxiety, and the chronic stress that shortens lifespans, and that racism is a traumatic event and produces trauma.
• we drew attention to highly vulnerable groups of people traditionally invisible in policy, such as trans people of African Descent and we have produced recommendations on how to address intersectional human rights issues by EU anti-racism policy.

We know that racism is not only a question of injustice or inequality. It is a determinant of health. It scars the mind, agitates the body, and passes from one generation to the next. The World Health Organization reminds us that discrimination contributes to illness — through stress, inflammation, and unequal access to care. And for women of African descent, those harms are multiplied by gendered violence and exclusion.

Over the years, laws have multiplied, and therapies have evolved:

• Legal frameworks are essential — they protect, they punish, they promise equality. But law has its limits when the injury lives in the nervous system, in memory, and in silence. Courts ask for evidence and justice procedures can re-expose pain rather than release it.
• And traditional therapies, however valuable, often rely on language and logic — the very tools that trauma sometimes shuts down.

Today, we will therefore speak about another response — culture and art.

As researchers like Bessel van der Kolk and Gabor Maté remind us, the body remembers what the mind cannot. Trauma speaks through breath, through pulse, through stillness. And it heals through rhythm, through ritual, and through connection.

Neuroscience now confirms what communities have known — art can heal:

• Rhythm regulates the heartbeat and synchronizes breath.
• Imagery reconnects emotion and memory.
• Storytelling restores voice and belonging.
• Song releases oxytocin — the chemistry of trust.
• Dance reshapes posture and power.

The World Health Organization reviewed over 3,000 studies across Europe showing that the arts improve well-being, reduce depression, strengthen community bonds, and help people recover hope.

Our task is to ensure that art is not seen as decorative, but as transformative. That governments, health systems, and education institutions embed the arts into trauma-informed care and social policy.

We should treat culture as a vital component of justice and health — to be protected, resourced, and institutionalized. We should fund the arts with the same seriousness we give to medicine and law. We should train facilitators in trauma safety and cultural competence.

Above all, we should approach this work with humility and imagination. Because healing is not linear — it is relational. It happens in clinics, yes — but also in song circles, in poetry readings, in the small, sacred spaces where people breathe and create together.

The right to health and the right to culture are not separate. Let us, again, in all humility, try to mark today as a turning point —

Where the arts are not an afterthought to justice, but its heartbeat.
Where reparation means not only compensation, but creation.
Where healing is not a private act, but a shared cultural movement.
Where, through words, rhythm, and image, we reclaim the full humanity that racism tried to take away.

Thank you.