The focus on human rights has become a worldwide one, according to Robert S. Drinan, S.J., a Georgetown Law Center professor and former Democratic Congressman from Massachusetts, who spoke Tuesday in the McGhee Library.
“The moral power of human rights today is astonishing. No one is against human rights,” Drinan said.
According to Drinan, the focus on human rights resulted from destruction wrought by World War II, which served as a catalyst for the formation of the United Nations in 1946 and, three years later, the affirmation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Because it guaranteed the rights to freedom, political expression and self-determination, Drinan said, the Declaration helped to give voice to the concerns of the world’s newly sovereign nations.
“At least 100 nations have been born from the ashes of colonization and they are struggling for some place in this world,” Drinan said.
Though the Cold War pushed human rights to the periphery of public consciousness, Drinan said that in recent years there have been remarkable strides in the field. He pointed in particular to the 1993 Vienna Conference as one such achievement.
Drinan was one of 13 Jesuits among 3,000 delegates representing 172 nations who reported the developments of the conference to the Jesuit Community at large.
Drinan said the conference’s primary concern was to reaffirm the world’s devotion to human rights which it did by asserting the rights of the indigenous, handicapped, women and children.
“The world has said, since 1945, that every nation, every person, is entitled to economic and political rights,” Drinan said.
Drinan outlined the major human rights crises in the world today, which include malnourishment, the conditions of penal systems worldwide and the plight of refugees.
“There are 17 million refugees worldwide, 2 million of them are Afghan. Thirty-five thousand children die each day of preventable causes. That’s 17 million deaths each year.”
While Drinan commended the United States in some areas, he also pointed out its weaknesses in others. The United States accepts more refugees seeking asylum than all the other nations of the world combined, but Drinan said it has been slow to ratify some of the major tenets of the Vienna Conference, including treaties on the rights of women and children.
Drinan said human rights are not unique to the 20th century. According to Drinan, human rights played a large part in the creation of the church or its work since then.
“The Catholic church has always been there in the history of human rights … Human rights are not secular or part of the enlightenment … Social justice and faith have always gone together.”
The speech was sponsored by the Sodality of our Lady Immaculate.
