Slovenia's Human Rights Ombudsman Peter Svetina has met UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet, who is attending the Bled Strategic Forum (BSF). The pair discussed challenges in protecting human rights, with Bachelet also attending the ombudsman's council meeting.

Bachelet presented to the council some of the challenges faced by the UN, including in setting guidelines for establishing human rights. She focused on rights in business, which was also the main topic of the council meeting.

According to Bachelet, numerous countries are facing challenges in implementing guidelines in smaller companies and are seeing violations of human rights in supply chains, with parts of the world even using child labour.

The UN official pointed at another great challenge - the use of new technologies in securing human rights, saying that this difficult task opened up certain risks and ethical dilemmas which needed to be brought into the spotlight.

Moreover, one needs to be careful in encroaching on human rights due to security concerns, she was quoted as saing in the ombudsman's press release.

Artificial intelligence development is beneficial for humankind, but also results in prejudices which developers include in their products. "We cannot ignore the fact that human intelligence imposes prejudices on AI," said Bachelet.

She drew attention to another two key challenges in terms of human rights protection - hate speech and climate crisis.

According to her, climate change-driven migrations are on the rise. At the same time, social networks are enabling new forms of communication which often crosses the line of acceptable behaviour.

Svetina highlighted the issue of balancing the economy and care for the environment, which is also one of the topics tackled by his institution.

Bachelet agreed with him that this challenge was one of the toughest ones and needed to be dealt with at the highest level of human rights protection efforts.

The UN high commissioner believes that green and clean energy measures need to be in focus in business as well as strategies for business opportunities.

She praised Slovenia's efforts in promoting the human right to health and welcomed the country's step of enshrining the right to drinking water in its constitution, reads the release. (STA)