ROMA (ITALPRESS) – “Seven years ago, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights set a simple and revolutionary principle at the centre of the international order: Each person, as such, has inviolable rights. This is the message that the international community wanted to entrust to the future, drawing lessons from the moral and material rubble of world conflicts. It is a message that continues to urge our collective consciousness.” This is said by the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, on the occasion of the World Day of Human Rights.
“Even today, human rights suffer multiple attacks – the head of the state continues –. The wars – old and new – return to project their shadow on civilian populations, causing unarmed victims and bringing everywhere suffering and destruction, as the chronicle of contemporary conflicts painfully confirms. Violence against women and children, discrimination, erosion of democratic freedoms, often assume the form of a general retraction of legal civilization with respect to the goals we believed acquired. Again, we see racism, aggression, inequalities: phenomena that history had already warned not to repeat. There is an inseparable relationship between human rights and peace: respect for the first is the essential premise of the second, while the absence of peace damps the hope of protecting rights and freedom.”.
“The evidence of this relationship helps to understand how peace is the result of a daily commitment and shared responsibility, which finds its foundation in the protection of the dignity of each person and in the rejection of the logic of overwhelming. In this regard, international law and multilateral institutions play a decisive role, as concrete instruments of protection for States as for each individual human being – Mattarella points out. To weaken them means exposing each individual, in particular, the most vulnerable to the risk that existence ends up being regulated by prevarication and abuse of force. The Italian Republic, on this Day, renews its firm support for an international order based on respect for human rights. It is a commitment that descends from our history and values carved in the Constitution: the repudiation of war, the promotion of justice, the affirmation of solidarity, equality and freedom. These are the same values that have inspired the European construction, which has become an unprecedented space for peace and rights. Remembering the centrality of human rights does not mean indulging in the memory of pain, but taking that memory as a guide to action – Mattarella concludes. It is to this responsibility that we are called: to prevent violence from prevailing on the rules, to affirm the universality of the principles that protect human dignity, so that the Declaration of 1948 does not only remain a statement of high ideals but is concrete code of conduct to which all States choose to conform.”.
– Press office photos Quirinale –
(ITALPRESS).
