Conflict Resolution and Human Rights - contradictory or complementary?
Lecture given by Baroness Helena Kennedy QC, at the University of Ulster Jordanstown on 23rd May 2001 Accessed at http://www.incore.ulst.ac.uk/home/publication/conference/Conflict_resolution.pdf on 1 October 2003
War at the end of the twentieth century has taken the world into new terrain. It is a new kind of war and call it what you will - civil war, ethnic conflict - it poses entirely new challenges to statesmen, diplomats, soldiers, lawyers, aid workers - and citizens. It sets challenge for us all.
Human rights and conflict resolution are intimately entwined with one another. The relationship is close and complex. Abuse of human rights prompts conflict. Conflict results in human rights abuses. It is a vicious circle, and, as the 21st Century dawns, it is the nightmare from which we are all trying to awake. No one understands this better than the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, to whom the grizzly task of mediating and resolving our disputes so often falls. "Everything I touch is a race against time," he says "- to save lives, to stop killing. One of the areas we have really tried to make a difference is to really get the governments and public engaged in the issue of good governance, to respect the rule of law and human rights - to let people know that they do have rights and not everything is at the beck and call of governments".
Human rights have to be, by definition are, complementary to conflict resolution. This is not because the two things are easy to reconcile. Clearly they are not. But resolution of conflict and adherence to human rights must go hand in hand because in the long term the one will not work without the other. This is partly because of the universality of human rights. By their very nature they attach to every individual. The dichotomous problem of human rights abuses causing conflict while also being the result of conflict is very real. But what's more, in these new wars, spawned by globalisation, human rights abuses often seem to be the very point of a conflict. To ignore or overlook human rights in the process of resolving these conflicts would be a travesty.
There is a tough dilemma facing western democracies. They are on the one hand retreating from war as it has traditionally been understood, and engaging in a process of 'debellicization'. European defence budgets are falling as the willingness to fight in wars and to pay for them - rather than health, education or care for the elderly - has diminished. Yet at the same time there is a heightened sense of responsibility for, and horror at, the desperately bloody internecine conflicts that recur in Africa, south-eastern Europe and elsewhere. So, as the importance of military muscle in the power stakes declines, does the developed debellicised world have the capacity to meet the security needs of the still bellicose world? Human rights are important here. By keeping them firmly on the agenda we can, perhaps, diminish the space for violent conflict.
Universality
The most obvious reason for asserting that human rights must be a central part of the process of conflict resolution is because of the universal nature of those rights. We all have a sense of justice and injustice. Human rights are, in a way, an exposition and codification of what, as sentient moral beings, we feel that each person has a right to in life. They place justice, tolerance, mutual respect and human dignity at the heart of all our activity. Human Rights do not confer upon individuals privileges that they might never have expected. They are not a special benefit, granted by accident of birth or a luxury for those who find themselves in the right place at the right time. They are an articulation of the moral consensus, and as such must be available to all.
It was in the aftermath of the Holocaust, in the still fresh fever of outrage and disgust that international law turned its attention to individuals and the concept of modern human rights was unlocked. Never again would such atrocities take place. Individual humanity would be protected and individual responsibility for such egregious crimes would be recognised. This was something entirely new and it had enormous potential. Pledges were made and a new world order was heralded.
Governments across the world, in an impressive demonstration of their vision, showed considerable humility in the face of the unspeakable horror of the previous decades. In 1948 the Genocide Convention was drawn up. It obliged all signatory countries to prosecute a person for genocide, regardless of where it occurred. The Geneva Conventions of 1949 consolidated the new commitment by defining as 'grave breaches' the most serious of war crimes and creating a duty on signatories to bring to trial offenders under the Convention. These and other international conventions posit the possibility of a general consensus that under no circumstances should Governments use torture or abuse fundamental human rights - irrespective of ideology. No regime was to consider itself superior to the international conventions. No government should be able to claim that it carried out torture in a good cause. Stalin claimed it in support of his vision of the grand communist project over half a century ago; supporters of Pinochet claim the same thing today. Human Rights are values which must exist independent of ideology.
It is from this universality that they derive their potency. Yet universality is perhaps, the crux of the difficulties faced today by proponents of human rights. At the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in 1993 it was mainly the West which argued for universality - though its record on adherence to human rights is scarcely as impeccable as it might believe. China, meanwhile, argued that cultural differences should be taken into consideration when discussing human rights. But it is this argument of cultural relativity that is used to justify female circumcision and all manner of abuses against women. Poor countries of the South seek to reject complaints about prison conditions or the right to a fair trial on the grounds that with competing demands on negligible resources, strategies to deal with starvation or poverty should come first.
Countries can sometimes be persuaded that it is in their own interests economically and politically, rather than morally, to adhere to human rights agreements. The problem with this approach is that once expediency is the criteria, a country which in one set of circumstances may agree to protect human rights, because its leaders feel that it is in its political interest to do so, may subsequently with equal ease choose to violate human rights when adherence is no longer in the political interest.
Behind this practical problem is a theoretical one. The notion of rights is itself very much a product of the Enlightenment. The essence of our contemporary understanding of Human Rights is contained in the great statements of rights of the late 18th Century - in particular the American Bill of Rights and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789 - and our modern understanding of rights owes much to these documents. Philosophers questioned the unthinking obedience to religion and the monarchy and through a rationalising, scientific study of human and social relations developed the idea of rights rather as we find them today.
Yet in the second half of the twentieth century it has become clear that the Enlightenment quest for an objective way of looking at the world was doomed to failure. Science and the rational method can make no privileged claim to objectivity and other ways of seeing and interpreting the world about us may have equal validity.
On the face of it, this shift away from the dogmatic application of the scientific method might seem to make life easier to proponents of human rights. Truly rational justifications for rights are notoriously elusive. Happily, it is no longer thought necessary or desirable to justify human rights scientifically. But it is proving extremely difficult to deliver a satisfactorily universal conception of rights in the modern era.
Liberals now try to justify rights as the articulation of an underlying moral consensus. We see this argued most clearly by John Rawls in his book A Theory of Justice. "We do not all agree on whether we should go to Church on Sunday, but we do agree that everyone should have the right to do so". The end of the Enlightenment frees us from the need to justify this belief rationally. We argue it on the basis of tolerance and mutual respect, values crucial to the wellbeing of a civilised society
Despite the problems I refuse to be pessimistic. I do believe that across cultures there are genuinely universal values. One of our mistakes is to perceive orthodox expressions of any religion as representative of whole cultures. Most Muslims in the UK would not accept as representative of Islamic values the Taliban strictures against women who are not adequately veiled. I am convinced that across most religions essential tenets can be identified. What's more, anyone who has been subject to torture, who has been imprisoned without trial for their political beliefs, or who has been victim of violations of the Geneva convention in Chechnya will be quick to tell you that they want greater promotion of and respect for universal human rights, not less.
The reason for my optimism is the strength and power of the mother document for global human rights, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. There are a number of features about it that are striking. First, the model is familiar. Throughout recorded history the world's great religions and belief systems have tackled the difficult issue of providing guidance for how we organise ourselves in society and creating rules for how we should live together. Many of the ideas embedded in these belief systems are to do with concepts such as natural justice and what is and what is not morally acceptable. In most cases the systems are codified and written down and to a greater or lesser extent reflect the prevailing ideologies of the societies that produce them. The largest and most powerful religions have become supranational over time and have a more or less uneasy relationship with states. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is also an attempt to record in writing a value system that provides a blueprint for how we conduct ourselves in society. However, the Universal Declaration differs in significant ways from previous codes of behaviour and law:
· It is decidedly intentional and not an organic and pragmatic construct that developed over time
· It is scrupulously secular. Whereas what had gone before appealed at the highest level beyond the human to the godly, the Universal Declaration is self-consciously appealing to the earthly and human - the responsibility for these questions is all ours.
· It was designed from the outset to be universal and to apply to all nation states.
· It was intended from the start to be subversive: it seeks explicitly to be propagated through schools and educational institutions because that is where prevailing ideologies are learnt.
These differences make the Universal Declaration the single most important and revolutionary document of the last millennium, and arguably of all time. I am certainly convinced that just as democratic rights were the driving idea at the turn of the nineteenth century, so the notion of substantive rights will be seen in retrospect as the dominant idea at the turn of the twentieth century.
New wars
Despite their universality it can seem difficult to reconcile the safeguarding of human rights with conflict resolution. Protection of even the most fundamental of human rights - the right to life - has proved difficult for those who have been involved in peacekeeping, conflict prevention and conflict resolution over the last decade. Many of the initiatives undertaken by international parties have neither protected human rights nor enhanced the prospects of resolving or preventing conflict. You only have to think of what Shashi Tharoor, former special assistant to Kofi Annan called 'that dreadful summer of 1994' when the UN Security Council had sought to send five and a half thousand troops to Rwanda. The Security Council hoped it could stall the onslaught of genocide, but it was thwarted by the refusal of any government to contribute their men - in spite of the fact that 19 governments had previously committed 31,000 soldiers to peacekeeping in Rwanda. You only have to think of the so-called safe area of Srebrenica, so inadequately protected that it was overrun by Serbs and several thousand Muslim men were killed. Why have those who have sought to intervene and bring protection to people at risk failed so badly to do so? Why has it been so difficult to incorporate a genuine respect for human rights into approaches to conflict?
The reasons are myriad and we could spend hours discussing the problems, but I do want to highlight one particular issue here. That is the very important question of the nature of war at the end of the twentieth century. Wars between states have diminished, while wars within states have escalated enormously. These wars are not entirely new - there have always been conflicts between groups and persecution of those whose gender, race, religion or nationality makes them different. But with the end of the Cold War these smaller scale, often internal conflicts have loomed much larger than before, as our attention is turned away from war on a grand scale and towards war in microcosm. We are not experiencing total war like that in the First and Second World Wars, or the state of permanent mobilisation of the Cold War. What we have seen in many regions is a breakdown in the control of organised violence. Though genocide, crimes against humanity, aggression against civilians, destruction of cultural monuments and other tactics are proscribed in international law they now feature as central to the act of war in the new conflicts with which we are besieged.
If you look to Bosnia and Kosovo, Rwanda, Somalia, the political goals of these wars are based upon claims to power that draw upon traditional identities of nation, religion or tribe. But the politics of these identities are not as traditional as they might sound. They emerge from the ruins of states in the process of disintegration, to embrace those who have been excluded. Identity politics are rooted in parallel economies which develop in the face of the rapid implementation of neo-liberal market policies in transitional states. These policies have resulted in desperate unemployment and income disparities, which in turn create conditions ripe for the development of the black market, illegal trafficking and corruption. Finally the diminishing importance of ideology has left a political vacuum which has been filled by the politics of nationhood. Identity politics fill the space that these political changes have created. The instability that these problems cause send people in pursuit of group protection. They seem to help people escape what they see as disempowerment and disenfranchisement in a globalised world.
The politics of identity contrast sharply with the politics of ideas. The politics of ideas hold up a vision for the future - the possibilities that might be championed by socialists or environmentalists. Politics of identity, by contrast, do not have a vision of a brighter future. In fact in many ways we might call them a politics of exclusion. Embraced by those who sense that they are excluded from global politics, they too seek to exclude. They defend themselves with a retreat in to glorious histories and ancient feuds that define who is, and who is not eligible to participate.
When it comes to the violence that these politics spawn, we find that war crimes, genocide, crimes against humanity and breaches of the Geneva Conventions are no longer equally eschewed by those who perpetuate conflict. In the wars of the late 20th Century, the goals and means used to achieve them have radically changed. The conventional tactics of war, which aimed to win territory through military control, have largely vanished. Instead, actors try to conquer and defend territory by gaining and maintaining political control. When the parties to the war are defined by identity this can mean expulsion - or worse - of those people who belong to the 'wrong' ethnic group. The tactics used to achieve these aims are, unsurprisingly, dramatically different from these used in earlier wars. These new conflicts, which occur among ethnic or national groups, often within states, not between them, are not, then, fought over principles or ideas. Their real focus is difference. Difference real or imagined, and more often than not, created. The nature of these new kinds of conflicts has implications for how they should be resolved. Far too often hitherto there has been a failure to make the imaginative and conceptual leap between the traditional idea of conflict and the reality of post-modern war. What makes the promotion of human rights in conflict situations incredibly difficult - but for the same reason absolutely critical - is that attacks on human rights are often at the very heart of these conflict situations - whether violent or not. If there is to be a long term solution the restoration of legitimacy is necessary - this means that the control of organised violence by public authorities must be regained, requiring both the re-establishment of the rule of law and a rebuilding of trust in public authorities. It is simply not possible to do this on the basis of identity politics. They leave no space for difference or diversity. They are based upon fear and self-interest, which thrive in a culture where insecurity flourishes. Consent is an alien concept. What is needed as an alternative is a political project which has its sights trained firmly upon the horizon, and which, at its core, nourishes democratic, inclusive values which strike at the heart of exclusivist ideals.
Mary Kaldor has suggested that what we should be aiming for is a cosmopolitan politics which does just that, and which is inclusive, fostering respect for international legal norms, most notably human rights. In every conflict there are voices that speak out against these exclusivist politics - whether they are the Hutus and Tutsis who called themselves Hutsis and fought against genocide in Rwanda or the elders in northwest Somaliland who negotiated peace there.
There are all kinds of reasons why the international community has not always dealt effectively with the new wars. The media has played its part, as has the poor co-ordination and funding of our international institutions and the short-term perspective of too many politicians. But just as important as these explanations, is the fact that there has been a widespread failure to grasp what is at the root of the smaller scale but very brutal modern wars that we have experienced in recent decades. These kinds of conflicts are so often understood as a chaotic return to a more unruly and primitive age that they are not always accorded the appropriate response. Mary Kaldor has argued that we must be much more political in our response to conflict. We should not step back from the terrifying bloodiness of this kind of war and assume that it is some kind of throwback to a more brutal age, the effects of which must be ameliorated, without addressing the causes. We must hold up the principles of an inclusive politics in the face of exclusivism. We have to champion international legal norms and human rights, where lawlessness seeks to prevail.
Warlords and dictators alone should not set the agenda. Often their power relies upon the manipulation of fear, and so it may not be in their interests to secure peace. The mediators and diplomats who have participated in negotiations have sometimes been too ready to accept the political goals of the parties to conflict. Of course, the warlords must be involved in the process to ensure that violence is brought under control. This can create space for civil society to develop and in which alternative political visions, which do not rely upon the ultimate power of force, can grow. In this climate, then, human rights are central. They lie at the heart of communities in which tolerance and mutual respect are nourished as an antidote to the seeds of fear that are sown in so many bloody conflicts. We should look to the alternative politics, to the other voices in the community as a source of legitimacy in a post-conflict period. People need to be able to create civic identities that are sufficiently robust to survive the corrosive attraction of ethnic allegiance. It is often the fears prompted by the disintegration of states and the collapse of institutions that initiates ethnic fragmentation. If some stability and legitimacy can be restored, the retreat into ethnic politics is no longer an imperative.
In the long term human rights are important in conflict resolution because they play a central role in the civilising processes which may be able to put regions of conflict on a permanent path to reconciliation, stability and peace.
Imagining the other
I want to turn for a few moments to the question of 'the other' in conflict. Our actions towards others are shaped by how we imagine them, and one of the problems in conflict situations is the inability of parties to imagine each other. If we can imagine others we can more easily conceive of the possibility of equality with them. Elaine Scarry, Professor of English at Harvard, has written engagingly about this problem, 'the difficulty of imagining other persons'. She makes two important points. First, that we cannot rely on the imagination alone as a means of bridging the divides between nations or groups. Second, that because of this tendency of the imagination to fail us in our attempts to understand others, we must provide other mechanisms for ensuring empathy.
This is important. Many thinkers have tried to address the question of how to fill the space that can divide ethnic or racial groups. Being able to empathise with 'the other' is important, but do we need something more enforceable to ensure that equality is achieved? Of course people do act in generous and benevolent ways all the time, even when the law does not require it. But we cannot rely upon their ability to do so. Imagining people who are different - even when you live with them as neighbours - is an incredibly difficult task. Generous imaginings alone are inadequate. Instead Scarry argues we need mechanisms and procedures to make toleration and accommodation real. She draws upon John Locke's A Letter Concerning Toleration where he says that
Whatever have been the occasions [of our miseries and confusions] ... [w]e have need of more generous remedies ... It is neither declarations of indulgence, nor acts of comprehension, such as have yet been practised or projected among us ... Absolute liberty, just and true liberty, equal and impartial liberty is the thing we stand in need of'
What Locke reminds us here is that generous attempts at imagining and understanding other people are benevolent and noble, but that perhaps the most benevolent thing of all is to enshrine equality, tolerance and freedom in a constitutional or legal guarantee. This is the role of human rights. They are a framework, a tool, for managing people's relations with one another.
Yes, human beings are capable of the most noble and magnanimous behaviour. But we also know they are capable of quite the opposite. The best way of avoiding the miseries and confusions that beset human relations is not to hope only for increased understanding among peoples - though that of course is crucial - but also to provide a structure which promotes tolerance. Human Rights do this. In conflict situations they provide a framework for negotiation. They enable us all to dispense with the baggage of identity and self, which may hinder our ability to offer others the goods that we seek for ourselves and our own. By drawing us all on to one level, it becomes impossible for us to discriminate one from another. By protecting human rights we protect the equality and freedom of each person.
Universal but not absolute
Although Human Rights are universal, they are not absolute and this is an important distinction. It is worth reminding ourselves of the words of Article 29 of the Universal Declaration in full:
Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.
In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society
These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
The final article of the Declaration goes further still:
Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.
These concluding points within the Universal Declaration point to an important problem, and one that is pertinent to the role of human rights in conflict situations. A debate about rights might seem unnecessary if each of us assumed that every right is owed to us unmediated, unnegotiated and unadulterated. But we should not assume that this is the case. The Universal Declaration included articles 29 and 30 to make this point; in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights limitations on rights are included in each specific article.
In claiming our rights we must confer due respect on the rights of others and accept that their rights can limit ours. Not every right is available unmediated. Sometimes, in the light of the competing rights of others it is necessary to negotiate and prioritise in order that each person in each community may benefit from the goods that are inherent in a free, democratic and, hopefully, moral order. The eminent philosopher Isaiah Berlin was concerned with this issue, with what might be called tragic choice. Compromise, in his view, is always necessary. Berlin was preoccupied particularly with the needs of the liberal society, but the point has much wider relevance. Conflict among human goods is ubiquitous, and recognition of that conflict and the existence of forums for its management in democratic institutions, was, in Berlin's view, the only peaceful way of dealing with such conflict. He recognised, nonetheless, that the compromises and choices that had to be made within societies were not painless.
Sometimes they caused great anguish and even harm. These choices are often tragic, because they do require significant choice between diverse human goods. There will always be loss. Is it true, he asked 'that all tragedy is merely due to error, fallibility, that all questions are answerable, that all ills are in principle always curable, that everything must come out well in the end…?' I think the answer to this question is no. Tragedy can occur contrary to our best intentions. Everyone needs to engage in imaginative and generous choices in order to accommodate the needs and, indeed, the rights of others.
Human rights and justice
Once the conflict is over, and the process of reconciliation has begun, how should we deal with the people who have perpetrated crimes, and who have followed the path of soulless and brutal politics? Should they be pardoned or punished? It is a complex problem and there is no-one-solution-fits-all answer here. Conflicts can be played out in dramatically different ways and the response to each cannot be uniform. The answer to the question is often dictated by political concerns, and successful negotiations frequently depend on compromises by all parties. In such circumstances justice becomes a bargaining chip like any other. During the periods of transition from conflict, or brutal dictatorship (as in South America), it is often not the right time to prosecute crimes against humanity and war crimes. But I am a lawyer, and it probably won't surprise you that my view is that when we look at the big picture, it is clear that for real healing and long-term reconciliation to be secured, those who have committed serious crimes and breaches of human rights must be brought to justice.
In a way there are two reasons why prosecution of human rights abuses is important. The first is a principled reason, the second a practical one. On principle, the force of law must be brought to bear on those who have assumed that they are beyond its reach. Article 2 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights requires that signatories ensure that victims of rights violations 'shall have an effective remedy, notwithstanding that the violation has been committed by persons acting in an official capacity'. The Torture Convention, the Genocide Convention and the 1949 Geneva Convention are even more explicit, speaking not just of remedies but also of prosecution, punishment and extradition. We have established international legal norms which outlaw such acts, and provide for their remedy. Now we must stand by those norms. If they are worth more than the paper they are written on they must be upheld. The practical reason is this: if we want to achieve reconciliation in the long term nothing but justice really works. Is a truth commission satisfactory? It is often held up as a means of promoting reconciliation, and, indeed, the South American Truth Commissions were important because the crimes they attempted to uncover - the 'Disappearances' in Argentina, El Salvador and Chile - were so unknowable. But knowing the truth may be only the beginning. Knowing what abuses were perpetrated does not hinder a sense of injustice if those who committed them are able to walk free and unrepentant. That sense of injustice may prevent a society from moving on.
I think that Hannah Arendt was right when she said that 'men are unable to forgive what they cannot punish' . Forgiveness per se is not a prerequisite of reconciliation. But there needs to be something like it. A fair trial holds the perpetrators to account, and fulfils a duty to the victims. It deals with the past more effectively than any other mechanism because it can punish - though does not necessarily do so. It amounts not to revenge for the past but a reckoning with it. The past will linger in the present until it is dealt with in a fair way and it can be difficult to escape the cycle of violence if we cannot close the chapter on history. No, it is unlikely that the horrors of the last century will be quickly forgotten by those states or groups that experienced them. But if we are satisfied that those who are responsible have been held to account individuals, groups and nations can look more easily to the future.
As my colleague, the lawyer Geoffrey Robertson has written of the propagators of genocide in Cambodia, 'the continued freedom of these men mocks humankind'. Sometimes realpolitik is necessary. We have to make deals and compromises to end conflicts. But in the long term expediency will not satisfy the need for justice, as people seek to understand and come to terms with the personal disasters they and their communities have suffered.
Searching for Utopia
There is no question that our pursuit of human rights is an ideal, not least in situations of brutality. But I think that it is important that we hold onto the ideal despite the difficulty of achieving it. For centuries philosophers and thinkers have put their minds to the complex question of what is and what is not central to the well-being of human beings. What ideas, what principles will ensure societies and cultures where men and women can flourish?
Human rights do not provide an overarching ideology which shapes a cradle to grave solution to life's hardships, but we can at least conceive of the conditions without which humankind will be hampered, in which it will struggle, flail and gasp for breath. The philosopher Simon Blackburn has put it this way: "[One] approach to what matters in living well is to consider what has to be avoided. … We don't want to suffer from domination by others, or powerlessness, lack of opportunity, lack of capability, ignorance. We don't want to suffer pain, disease, misery, failure, disdain, pity, dependency, disrespect, depression, melancholy. Hell was always easier to draw than heaven."
Actually, we should be more positive than Simon Blackburn. Yes, we can set out the ills we must prevent, but we can also present them as the goods that we require to live a fulfilled life. And one of the ways we have described those goods is as human rights. Human rights are aspirational, idealistic, utopian.
E H Carr said that politics must combine both realism and utopianism. Politics must be conscious of the limits of power but at the same time acknowledge the aspiration for an alternative. This quest for something greater and nobler is central to the human condition. Often these ideals cannot be fully realised, but they are no less significant for that. A society that has no utopia, no vision of a better future, is like an individual that does not dream. We are driven by the pursuit of greater things and we must maintain our focus on them, on the horizon. Of course, our utopian visions should not be so remote that we cannot even imagine that they might be realised. If there is no possibility of realisation, utopia loses its purchase. We are diminished by dreaming idle dreams which can never be real. In this way history makes fools of us. Instead we must somehow strike a balance - to find perhaps, what W G Runciman calls the 'improbably possible', rather than the 'probably impossible.' We must pin our colours to those ideals which address fearlessly seemingly intractable contemporary problems, stretching our horizons, radicalising the agenda, and imagining the possible within the realms of the improbable. The abolition of slavery in the Americas may have seemed unlikely, 200 years ago, but it was possible ultimately, and it did happen. By daring to imagine what the pragmatists scorn we may achieve unlikely goals. And that is the role of human rights.
Reading the Universal Declaration again, it is a strikingly modern document. It is difficult to believe that it was drawn up more than 50 years ago. Half a century later, it remains an aspirational document. We should be unfazed by cynical claims that what seeks is 'probably impossible' and persist steadfastly in our pursuit of the 'improbably possible'.
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