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Message on International Human Rights Day

10 December, 2005

Saneh Chamarik

National Human Rights Commission, Thailand

10 December, 2005, is 57th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As we all know, it is created as a follow-up to the Charter of United Nations with the main purpose of establishing lasting peace and security. In response to all the atrocity and monstrosity of the Second World War, both significantly “reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women”. Peace and human rights indeed constitute two sides of the same coin. It is also prerequisite to true human progress, that is to say, a life world doing away with human domination, oppression, exploitation, and injustice.

Over half a century passing by, the Universal Declaration still remains with us and serves as a matter of moral and legal principle we earnestly hold on to in our everyday life, both within and among nations. On this account, we certainly have good reason to congratulate ourselves. At the same time, however, we just cannot afford to overlook the very fact of human hardships and sufferings, as we all have been witnessing today the world over. Individualism and liberalism, together with property rights, once historically, very well did serve as a means to promoting and protecting human rights. But it all now turns against them. And that makes human rights, as social learning process, a good deal more complicated and somewhat beyond understanding for common people. For all the material prosperity and consumerism coming along with globalization and economic growth so-called, human predicaments keep worsening. Unbridled individualism and free market ideology, as supreme and exclusive virtue of contemporary capitalism equipped with technological superiority, turn humankind into mutual distrust, intolerance and discrimination. Hence mutual destruction becomes the norm of the day! One cannot but help suspect that there is a certain inter-relatedness and interaction between current globalization and the phenomenon of terrorism. And each obviously works against human rights and dignity.

In response to all these inhuman rights to economic domination and exploitation, the Universal Declaration demonstrates its own dynamics. Also to the United Nations’ credit, a great variety of rights and liberties come to be formally recognized, accommodating practically all aspects of human life. The two set of human rights, civil and political liberties and economic, social, and cultural rights, come to be increasingly and holistically integrated. On top of traditional individualism, various forms of collective rights come to be increasingly exerted: minority culture, indigenous peoples and communities, and what not. New areas of human rights also come within the purview of those peoples and communities concerned: ecosystem, natural resources, traditional knowledge and wisdom, for instance. All this extension and proliferation of human rights is the new phenomenon. But it objectively represents reality of human life and relationship with nature that needs to be better understood. In this very sense, the concept and principle of human rights as enshrined in the Universal Declaration serves as the focal point. In short, there needs to be unity in diversity. Otherwise, mutual respect, a sense of brotherhood, tolerance and peace, as ideal and practice, just can never materialize.

All this is to be borne in mind “for everyone and everywhere in the world”, to use the late Franklin D. Roosevelt’s words. If anything, the auspicious 10 December 2005 in commemoration of the International Human Rights Day could very well serve as starting point for a process of looking back and rethinking with a view to genuine and long-lasting human freedom, justice and peace.