UN Human Rights Chief condemns Katie Hopkins & UK media hate speech

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The UN Human Rights Chief has asked the UK to get tough on tabloid hate speech in the wake of Katie Hopkins' offensive remarks about migrants.

In an unprecedented attack on tabloid papers, the UN issued a public statement today urging the UK to tackle the rising hate speech seen in the media, singling out The Sun as one of the newspapers featuring anti-foreigner articles.

Katie Hopkins has been reported to police on several occasions in the last month for her controversial comments, and has also failed to get any interviews for her new TV show being developed for cable network TLC.

The UN was highly critical of her comments, and released this statement today:

"An article by a Sun columnist on 17 April began with the words “Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in water, play violins and show me skinny people looking sad. I still don't care.” Elsewhere in the article she described migrants as “a plague of feral humans,” compared them to “a novovirus” and said some British towns were “festering sores, plagued by swarms of migrants and asylum seekers shelling out benefits like Monopoly money.”

The Sun columnist also advocated using gunboats to stop migrants, threatening them with violence, and said “drilling a few holes in the bottom of anything suspiciously resembling a boat would be a good idea too.”

In language very similar to that employed by Rwanda’s Kangura newspaper and Radio Mille Collines during the run up to the 1994 genocide, the columnist said “make no mistake, these migrants are like cockroaches.” Leading figures in both Rwandan media organizations were later convicted by an international tribunal of public incitement to commit genocide."

Ipso is currently investigating complaints related to the article and there have been calls for The Sun to fire Katie Hopkins. A petition launched this week by Izzy Saunders has gathered more than 280,000 signatures and demands that The Sun remove her column:

"We live in a forward thinking society and Katie Hopkins' views should not be encouraged; this is why I ask The Sun newspaper and editor David Dinsmore to remove Katie Hopkins as a columnist, at the very least to redeem yourselves from publishing this prejudiced article in the first place."

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