Human Rights under the spotlight
at Vatican Symposium
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| "Fundamental Rights and Conflicts among Rights", that is the title of an International Symposium which has been taking place this week at Rome's LUMSA University. |
“Fundamental Rights and Conflicts among Rights”, that is the
title of an International Symposium which has been taking place this week at
Rome’s LUMSA University.
By Lydia O’Kane
The two day symposium which ends Friday has been organized
by the Joseph
Razinger/Benedict XVI Vatican Foundation. Among those taking part is
Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal, Pietro Parolin, as well as, Princeton
Professor Robert George, and Harvard Professor, Mary Ann Glendon. In an address
to the meeting on Friday, Professor Glendon spoke on the “universal dimension
of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its effective application.”
Pick and choose attitude to rights
During her speech, the Harvard Professor spoke of a “pick
and choose attitude to rights” and said that Human Rights ideas have become a
victim of their own success. Speaking to Vatican News on this point, she said,
“unfortunately as soon as it showed its power all kinds of interest groups
said, hey let’s have our agenda items be declared human rights.”
Mary Ann Glendon also addressed the attacking of
rights that do not suit an agenda, stressing it is something that we should be
very concerned about because, “the principles that were put in documents like
the Universal Declaration are mutually conditioning, let’s take the biggest
example, we don’t want to give up freedom, we don’t want to give up equality,
but those two are always in tension and that’s part of the dynamic tension that
we live with in the democracies that we’re so fortunate to have, she said.”
"You could say", the Professor noted, “that
the multiplication of rights cheapens the currency; it has a lot of
very destructive effects, it undermines the normal process that we’re so lucky
to have in the liberal democracies of being able to talk to our fellow
citizens, arrive at compromises; that is what democratic politics is all about
and if you take those decisions out of the political process and have an all or
nothing decision by a court, then here’s what happens, the losers go away angry
and disappointed and they feel they have no remedies.”
Universal Declaration, the importance of reflection
Asked about the importance of reflecting on the Universal
Declaration seventy years on from its adoption, Professor Glendon described it
as, “very important because one of the earliest and most profound critics of
the abuses of the human rights idea was Benedict XVI ten years ago, in a speech
to the United Nations he laid out in great detail most of the problems that
have really come to the point where they threaten the very idea of universal
human rights.”
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