by Professor Dr. Alfred de Zayas, Geneva
Since 1981 the United Nations in New York as well as its regional offices in Geneva and Vienna, and its specialized agencies in Paris (Unesco), Nairobi (Unep), Santiago de Chile, etc. celebrate the International Day of Peace. This was confirmed and reinforced by the General Assembly in the Resolution 55/282 on 21 September 2001.
On the occasion of the International Day of Peace, the peace bell rang in the Japanese Garden at UN headquarters and the new UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon declared that peace is and will always be the main task of the organisation. He called to mind the ideal of peace within and among nations and requested all fighting parties to lay down their weapons.
In Geneva, in the Council Chamber at the Palais des Nations – the Francisco de Vitoria hall – a round table was conducted addressing the topic „The human Right to Peace“. Participants were Professor Carlos Villan Duran, Ingeborg Breines (Unesco Director in Geneva), Patricia Lewis (Director of UNIDIR), Andres Guerrero (Unicef), Luis Narvaez (Amnesty International), Valeriane Bernard (University of Brahma Kumaris) and Alfred de Zayas (representative of the International Society for Human Rights).
Professor Villan Duran presented the recently published book „La Declaration de Luarca“ (ISBN 978-84-95998-39-2) and called to mind that this declaration had been accepted on 30 October 2006, that it had been handed in to the UN Human Rights Council on 16 March 2007 and will probably be passed by the General Assembly in 2009. 57 individuals – many of them university students – attended this round table organised within the sixth session period of the UN Human Rights Council. I felt particularly honoured to read out the peace message by the Secretary General Ban-Ki-Moon. I explained that peace must not be merely a slogan. Peace means factual disarmament by the nuclear powers; prohibition of the threat of force or so-called preventive war, no false right to self defence. Peace does not allow colonial and imperial exploitation of the Third World. Peace means the right to development, the right to clean water, the right to a healthy environment and above all the right to one‘s own culture, religion and identity.
It is wrong to speak of a hierarchy of human rights, in which the “rights of the first generation“ (civil and political rights) are considered important, while the so-called „rights of the second generation“ (social economic and cultural) are neglected, not to speak of the „rights of the third generation“ (development, environment, peace). Instead of this artificial segmentation, another perspective would make more sense: rights as the human right to peace constitute a presupposition to allow the enjoyment of the rights of the second and first generation. But peace is not only a „right to empowerment“, which enables us to practise the other rights. Peace is not only a means to reach another goal - but is a goal in itself, i.e. the striving for realisation of human dignity in peace and security.
Ingeborg Breines called to mind the statement in the Unesco constitution, „since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed“. She spoke about the necessity to teach peace.
Patricia Lewis quoted article 11, paragraph 3 from the Luarca Declaration and pointed to the necessity to disarm and to use these means for development and human rights.
The reader is invited to learn more about the Luarca Declaration of Human Rights on the Webside of the Association Espanola para Desarrollo y la Aplicacion del Derecho International, www.aedidh.org. •
|