All modern human rights framework is grounded in the travesty of the Holocaust. Soon after the murder of six million Jews and millions of others by the Nazis and their accomplices, the United Nations was founded in 1945 with the objective of maintaining international peace and security. What followed next was the publication of and supposed international agreement on perhaps the most significant document to safeguard humanity — the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
© Provided by National Post Tacinisahan Mahmut holds photographs of family members who have been jailed or who have disappeared in her native East Turkistan, in the northwestern part of China, during a Nov. 23, 2021, rally on Parliament Hill organized by the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project and East Turkistan Association of Canada.
Adopted by the UN General Assembly 73 years ago on this day — Dec. 10, 1948 — it would become the moral and ethical compass for the advocacy for peace and security. Our celebration of Human Rights Day annually on this date should come with a profound recognition that it arose from the ashes of children, women and men who were murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and dozens more death camps.
Without universal guidelines, humanity’s primal tribal traits give way to chaos and violence. Humanity requires governance, codes of conduct and rules to build a productive civilization. For centuries, our moral compass was governed by religion. Much of what we see in today’s UDHR was not invented by its Canadian architect, John Peters Humphrey, or by Eleanor Roosevelt, who pressed the document forward at the UN.
The UDHR is a secularization of basic religious precepts. Its premise is firmly grounded in the original rules handed to the Jewish people in the Torah at Mount Sinai. Eventually these ideas were transmitted to other religions that sprouted from Judaism — particularly Christianity. We all know the basic principles found in most religions today: Honour thy mother and father; do not commit murder; do not commit adultery; do not steal; do not tell lies; do not be envious of others.
Human rights start with the simple, religion-based Golden Rule that should govern our conduct every day — “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” It’s a basic principle that every child on the planet should be taught to observe. On this day for human rights, let’s reinforce the UDHR’s basic foundational parameters including that “everyone has the right to life, liberty and security,” and that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”
In a world that is tearing itself apart at the seams, getting back to these basic human codes of conduct is more essential than ever. In the past number of days, Canada has joined the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia in a diplomatic boycott of China’s Winter Olympics in protest over its human rights abuses. Indeed, democracies — as few as they are today — are the only governing bodies standing against such darkness today.
Adopted by the UN General Assembly 73 years ago on this day — Dec. 10, 1948 — it would become the moral and ethical compass for the advocacy for peace and security. Our celebration of Human Rights Day annually on this date should come with a profound recognition that it arose from the ashes of children, women and men who were murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and dozens more death camps.
Without universal guidelines, humanity’s primal tribal traits give way to chaos and violence. Humanity requires governance, codes of conduct and rules to build a productive civilization. For centuries, our moral compass was governed by religion. Much of what we see in today’s UDHR was not invented by its Canadian architect, John Peters Humphrey, or by Eleanor Roosevelt, who pressed the document forward at the UN.
The UDHR is a secularization of basic religious precepts. Its premise is firmly grounded in the original rules handed to the Jewish people in the Torah at Mount Sinai. Eventually these ideas were transmitted to other religions that sprouted from Judaism — particularly Christianity. We all know the basic principles found in most religions today: Honour thy mother and father; do not commit murder; do not commit adultery; do not steal; do not tell lies; do not be envious of others.
Human rights start with the simple, religion-based Golden Rule that should govern our conduct every day — “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” It’s a basic principle that every child on the planet should be taught to observe. On this day for human rights, let’s reinforce the UDHR’s basic foundational parameters including that “everyone has the right to life, liberty and security,” and that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”
In a world that is tearing itself apart at the seams, getting back to these basic human codes of conduct is more essential than ever. In the past number of days, Canada has joined the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia in a diplomatic boycott of China’s Winter Olympics in protest over its human rights abuses. Indeed, democracies — as few as they are today — are the only governing bodies standing against such darkness today.
In Vienna, intensive discussions are underway again with Iran as Western allies try to avert a possible nuclear catastrophe with a radical Islamic regime clearly hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons. In many cases, defending human rights and averting a potential genocide involves more than negotiation and sanctions. In cases such as the Second World War and even recently in Rwanda and Bosnia, stopping an evil regime has required a military solution as a last resort.
The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) convention, adopted by the UN in 2005, requires member states to protect populations from genocide, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and war crimes. But tragically, we are failing, particularly in the case of Syria, where more than 350,000 civilians have been killed in its civil war — without as much as a peep from Arab neighbours and Western allies. Yemen and Africa, too, are on the cusp of famine due to continued war and ethnic conflict.
As democracies decline in number and strength and as the United Nations community of assembled states continues to overlook its foundational principles of preserving human and civil rights, the future of humanity is in jeopardy. Many in Western society focus on scientific innovations, on the next start-up, on the next electric car or their next vacation. We forget how fragile and insecure we really are. All this around us is a social construct, and material things become irrelevant when chaos and violence engulfs humanity. We need to protect our rights, our freedom and democracy first if we are going to protect our children and grandchildren from the coming storm. Think about it.
National Post
Avi Abraham Benlolo is the Founder and Chairman of The Abraham Global Peace Initiative.
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