The President of Ireland, Mary McAleese delivered the 3rd IHRC Annual Human Rights Lecture, "Celebrating the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of HumanRights", at the National Gallery of Ireland, on 25 November 2008.
Remarks by the President of Ireland at the Third Annual Irish Human Rights Commission (IHRC) Human Rights Lecture at the National Gallery
Distinguished guests, Ladies and Gentlemen
Is onóir mór domsa, mar Uachtáran na hÉireann, bheith i bhur láthair anocht chun labhairt faoin Dhearbhú Uile-Choiteann Cearta an Duine coicís roimh an 10 Nollaig 2008, comóradh seasca bliana an Dhearbhú. Táim fíor-bhuíoch don Choimisiúin um Chearta an Duine in Éirinn as ucht an deis speisialta seo a thabhairt dom.
I would like to begin by thanking the Irish Human Rights Commission and particularly its Chairman Maurice Manning and Chief Executive Éamonn Mac Aodha, for inviting me to deliver the third Annual Irish Human Rights Commission (IHRC) Human Rights Lecture. As we approach the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, surely one of the most remarkable and inspirational achievements of humankind, many people the world over have cause to gather and to contemplate its genius. We are fortunate to be able to do so, in freedom, still in relative prosperity, and in the beautiful surroundings of our National Gallery with its own array of other kinds of genius, each painting, each sculpture a remarkable, tangible, visible achievement, not unlike each victory notched up to human rights activism.
How should we use the 60th Anniversary?
We are a few minutes walk from O’Connell Street, our nation’s main thoroughfare named after that great champion of Catholic Emancipation, Daniel O’Connell. In fact we are very close to his Merrion Square home. The Liberator was a champion of all human beings whose lives, in many parts of the globe, were wilfully circumscribed by elitist and hierarchical authority structures which occasionally, begrudgingly conceded privileges to their ‘inferiors’ but were equally wilfully opposed to any notion of the innate rights of the human person. It would take wars and revolutions, rebellions and uprisings, threats of violence and acts of violence, courageous political activism and ground-breaking litigation, before the days of the selfish and self-righteous elites began to give way to the advent of egalitarian democracies and a new culture of embedded civil and human rights for all, not just for the privileged few. There is well over a century between O’Connell’s then radical vision of humanity and the construction of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which propounded a set of inherent and inalienable rights common to all people. The declaration’s eighteen framers undertook an enormous task. Here was a challenge and an uncompromising vision capable of transforming the world and offering real hope to those who longed for the recognition of their right to dignity, equality and justice.
A response to horrific truths
The first half of the twentieth century saw the sickening consequences of authority structures which were utterly absent of any sense of the worth of the individual or the rights of the individual. In their millions, young men were gathered into massive armies and in their millions they were brutally liquidated. Millions of hapless citizens found their faith, ethnicity, sexual orientation or politics had marked them out for a hatred that would brutally consume them. The untrammelled waste of human life, the evident pitiless evil of which humankind was capable, led to a context of the most sickening realities. It was in that context that the courageous and the visionary began to climb out of a cesspit of human degradation. In 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt famously declared to the US Congress that "Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere". By 1948, his wife Eleanor had played an instrumental role in taking the seed of this conviction and growing it into a comprehensive catalogue of human rights. The adoption of the Universal Declaration on the 10th of December of that year showcases that other side of humanity, its nobility, generosity, its decency, its determination to take humanity on a journey that would ascend to the highest aspirations and form a bulwark against descending to those darkest depths.
The Declaration details a series of fundamental human rights and freedoms that all States are expected to uphold in their respective domestic spheres. Its thirty Articles were hewn from the distilled wisdom of bitter experience and the deepest intuition about the conditions necessary to secure the vindication of the dignity of every human being. The Declaration is not, of course, legally binding but its moral force is supreme and its impact has already been considerable.
If I were to focus on two of what I see as the most remarkable aspects of the Declaration they would be its innovation in giving priority to the individual human being and the absolutely universal nature of the document.
Priority of the individual
With its focus on the individual, the great walls of state became penetrable and permeable, their treatment of citizens open to observation, to measurement, to accountability to the entire human family. For the Declaration makes each of us our brother’s and sister’s keeper, no matter where he or she is in the world. It makes us carers for one another, advocates and champions for our common stand on the rights of the individual. Not alone were the walls of state to be permeable but the walls of institutions, workplaces, of intimate spaces where bullying of all sorts can make a life miserable.
Sixty years ago the States of the world gathered, for the very first time, to draft a declaration that was not about interstate relations but about the intrinsic rights of the human being, the basic building block of all communities, all countries. Such a thing had never before occurred in human history. The era of enslavement to elites and ideologies now gave way to the era of well-articulated, universal rights and of human beings as holders of those rights. This was a time for the vindication of men and women who could and would stand their ground and create what Seamus Heaney has called "a grammar of imperatives, the new age of demands". Right across the world, invigorated and validated by the words of the Declaration, people of determination, with often only the most meagre of resources, have brought down the mightiest of tyrannical walls and curtains, regimes and governments, institutions and embedded practices, customs and attitudes.
The Declaration has been translated into 377 languages, an Ghaeilge san áireamh, making it the world’s most translated document, evidence if it was needed of the massive sense of ownership exercised by the world’s citizens over the Declaration and its values. The continuing dissemination of the document is still essential, for, although we can cite many successes, not least in Africa and Europe these past two decades, those who live within hard-won rights-based cultures know their pervasive vulnerability and need for eternal vigilance at macro and micro level. Those who do not yet live in such a culture need to believe their day will come.
And who is this individual to whom these rights apply? The reply from the Declaration is a breathtaking and magnificent visualization of humanity. The rights apply to everyone, regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, gender, disability, age and sexual orientation. What is more, they apply everywhere and always.
Universality
The universality of the Declaration created an image of our planet as a place without boundaries, a place where local or parochial vanities and taboos, traditions and inhibitions could never again be used to justify the marginalisation or exclusion of any human being. This was the voice of the global, human family speaking as one. Quite miraculously nations and states of vastly different economic philosophies, legal and cultural traditions and religious beliefs had agreed to a single conception of human dignity. They did not create the concept. They did not confer or concede the concept for the dignity of the human person is of our nature, intrinsic, transcendent, part of our essence and our being. In recognising that concept, a concept so long and so loudly denounced as radical and unlikely, the signatories created a dynamic that was to have and will continue to have exciting consequences for the development of humanity.
In this the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue we can clearly see in the very achievement of consensus on the Universal Declaration a phenomenal example of cross-cultural endeavour. Achievement of that consensus took three years of hard negotiation which is itself worth remarking on. Those of us who have lived through regional peace processes of considerably longer duration can only admire the focus and the determination of the UN Human Rights Commission which produced an historic agreement in such a relatively short period. When the Declaration came before the General Assembly on that historic December day it passed without dissent. What a profoundly telling moment in our global history and a moment that we need to remind ourselves commits us, every citizen of the world, to a process which has barely begun and is very far from over. The date of adoption of the Declaration was in many ways a zero hour for all of humanity. Each year since then the clock has been ticking, counting down the minutes to the end of the days of human degradation and the coming of the era when dignity triumphs – when human rights are fully realized, lived and vindicated throughout the world. It is a heavy lift and it needs considerable equipment to do the lifting.
Today we have a growing national and international machinery for the advocacy, development and pursuit of human rights. The Declaration provided the cornerstone for the United Nations human rights architecture and all legally binding human rights treaties have their roots in the document. Every State in the world has at this point ratified at least one of the United Nations core Conventions and eighty per cent of States have ratified four or more of these fundamental legally-binding documents. Ireland has ratified the six core UN human rights treaties and a wide range of other international human rights instruments. The Universal Declaration has also had a defining, cardinal influence in shaping the constitutions of many States around the world. In a world looking for sources of renewable energy, the Declaration has proven itself to be as fresh, relevant and inspirational today as it was six decades ago.
Bringing it all back home … and abroad
Our history as an unhappily colonised nation that had to fight for its freedom and for recognition of the dignity of its people has made us particularly empathetic to the purpose and content of the Declaration. It has made us rights-sensitive at home and rights-sensitive in the conduct of our foreign policy and in our support for human rights activists in difficult situations across the globe. Ours is a sensitivity forged out of bitter and direct experience of being on the receiving end of sustained human rights abuse. In every generation, and often at profound personal cost, Ireland has produced the finest of human rights champions who, like O’Connell, never saw themselves in narrow insular terms but as articulators of the rights of all humankind. Happily, we have also the direct experience of making peace with our once aggrandizing colonial neighbour and transforming that relationship into a powerful tool of collegiality in contemporary times, as partners within that other triumph of decency, the European Union, and as co-authors of the Northern Ireland Peace Process. Ours is a story of real hope for others who languish in similar situations even today and our historical experience has placed us in a strong position to play an important role in promoting human rights within the European Union and internationally, at the level of government and at the level of civic society. It is a matter of real pride that FrontLine, one of the leading international NGOs highlighting the work of human rights defenders, is Irish and that the adoption of the EU Guidelines on Human Rights Defenders was a primary goal of Ireland’s Presidency of the EU in 2004.
Within the Union, fundamental rights form a general principle, a core set of shared values that form the spine of EU law. At the dawn of the twenty-first century the Union solemnly proclaimed the Charter of Fundamental Rights, which draws deeply on the Declaration. Recent years have seen unprecedented EU solidarity at international human rights fora and, indeed, in signing the United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities in 2007, the European Union, as a body, signed a UN Human Rights instrument for the first time.
Article 3 of the UDHR declares that, "Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person". Without champions those words are just that, words. It takes men and women to commit to the work of breathing life into those words, to bring them into a living reality. That work is relentless and we in Ireland have a record second to none down through our history and still today in articulating those rights whether it is in sustaining the formidable effort required to transform the culture of Northern Ireland into a place where each and every citizen shared those basic rights or whether it is in the development work of Irish Aid, our missionaries and our NGOs, whether it is in addressing the obstacles to social inclusion of our traveller community, or working to promote the comfortable integration of our new migrant communities, whether it is in hosting the Special Olympics or in shifting our focus from disability to ability. The words of the Government White Paper on Irish Aid have a wide significance,
“We are bound together by a shared humanity. The fate of others is a matter of concern to us. From this shared humanity comes a responsibility …"
In this generation we have seen at first hand the positive and historic changes which can be wrought by mainstreaming human rights principles and by creating the mechanisms which sustain, promote and vindicate them. This year is also the 10th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement and 40th anniversary of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement. One of its prime champions, Michael Farrell, is now a distinguished member of the Irish Human Rights Commission, a body which, along with the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission, is part of the essential human rights infrastructure of the Good Friday Agreement. Such structures are important evidence of the mainstreaming of human rights consciousness at every level of political and civic society. They keep that consciousness at a high level of priority and ensure that the attitudes and mindsets which harbour reluctance to acknowledge the rights of others are persistently challenged, critiqued and outed, whether by advocacy or litigation.
Just as peace-making is a process, the growth of a human rights culture is also a process and indeed the two are intrinsic to one another. Persistent and pervasive human rights abuses are a recipe for instability and volatility whether we are speaking of the widespread social unrest that comes from the systemic denial of human rights to particular groups in society or whether we are talking about the unfortunate individual, abused in the home or institution or school, whose life is permanently blighted by the experience. Strong legislation and accessible mechanisms for the vindication of human rights are important elements in the process of full conversion to a culture in which respect for human rights is embedded and spontaneous.
The strong human rights focus of the Good Friday Agreement gave Ireland, North and South its own zero hour. With it came the chance to shift history’s kilter so that the future would be one of a deep reconciliation, fundamental to which is the acceptance of the right of the other to equality, to respect and to justice. The growing force of the Declaration of Human Rights in the world helped Ireland to straighten out the mess of history’s making, the skewed relationships, the culture of contempt that grew out of the culture of inequality. Now, as John Hewitt would say "We build to fill the centuries arrears".
And already the landscape opening up to us is a reassuring and exciting one for, wherever there is an absence of human rights, human potential is thrown away and wasted and we have known generations of waste. Now we face a future where we may at last see what happens when people, once estranged, work freely and comfortably together as equals and as partners, a phenomenon still not given to many among our common human family, a right still not realised. We have seen the surging power for good that was the result of recalibrating our relationship with Great Britain. It gave us the common approach and focus needed to secure the Peace Process and the Good Friday and St Andrew’s Agreements. We are set to see the great good that will come from recalibrating the once skewed cross-border relationship and we are hopefully set to see Northern Ireland flourish when her people stand shoulder to shoulder instead of toe to toe. By any set of measures our island has squeezed great value out of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Our story is one of its success stories.
Role of IHRC
And we will continue to look to the Declaration for future guidance along with our constitutional and other legal obligations, for the work of promoting and protecting the human rights of all our citizens is work that has to keep on. There are, thankfully, many voluntary and official agencies working in the complex human and civil rights space. Among them, the IHRC plays a hugely important role in keeping under review the adequacy and effectiveness of law and practice in the State in relation to the protection of human rights. It also helps to keep us educated and informed about human rights in our own back yard. Nothing stays the same as we have reason to know from recent economic events. The boundaries of rights are explored and pushed out by advocacy and litigation. New light is being shed on them all the time.
No other generation in our history has known the freedom and the opportunities that have been the experience of this generation. A new confidence has allowed many previously silent and excluded groups and individuals to step forward and claim their rights. It is a heartening story though often forged in heartbreak, but it is in many ways only the opening chapter of Ireland’s new and best story. Long before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was crafted we, the Irish people had already set out our human and civil rights stall in our 1937 Constitution which assured "the dignity and freedom of the individual" and before that in the 1916 Proclamation which set out the values that were to infuse our republic,
"The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and all of its parts, cherishing all of the children of the nation equally………."
Conclusion
2008 has indeed been a special year of anniversaries in the human rights space. Remembering has been salutary, necessary and worthwhile and I commend the Irish Human Rights Commission for bringing us to a place of masterpieces to remind ourselves that each one of us has the potential to be an artist in creating the greatest masterpiece of all – a universe where universal human rights flourish and where every child is cherished equally, at last.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh.