World Rights Day
What happens to human rights in the current
‘third world war in pieces’?
On this Day 2022, let us all try to look further afield, beyond the fears and indifference that run through our time, a time in which the dignity and respect of each and every person is increasingly at risk.
Unfortunately, more than seventy years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, there are still so many inequalities, so many denied rights to health, education and access to decent work. There are still too many conflicts, too many situations where peace is in constant danger, and where reception in other countries is too expensive.
They are thirty articles that have lost none of their topicality and it would be enough to quote a few of them to understand their initial concern for the future of man and his dignity.
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The Declaration of Human Rights was born in a Western context but is intended to be universal, in fact it has been widely verified that human rights is not a purely Western concept. It was in Paris in 1968: the 20th anniversary of the Declaration was being celebrated and, at UNESCO, they decided to engage in a daring historical and ethnographic experiment. Thus was born a precious documentation edited by Jeanne Hersch: The Right to Be a Man translated into many languages, which reports, neatly and without commentary, an immense material of the voices rising from time and space on the values of human being.
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From the most distant countries and the most remote epochs came to Paris the thoughts through which man revealed himself in his inviolable dignity. All the themes that inspired the Universal Declaration were there, expressed in a Babel of dead and living languages. And they were like offerings ‘piously preserved in the veils of words from other times and other places’.