Sir, - Paul Cullen has given us a good insight into the challenges facing Mrs Mary Robinson as UN Human Rights High Commissioner (The Irish Times, November 29th). However, in pondering the difficulties she is facing he raises the possibility that all her efforts may well end in another "heroic Irish failure" at Geneva.
I disagree. I believe that she has everything going for her to succeed. There is much more decency and good will in ordinary people around the world than commonly believed. More than that, millions of people have been victims themselves of gross abuses and certainly don't want their children to go through the same humiliation. The United Nations has become discredited because it has not been effective in defending the common standard of human dignity it set itself 49 years ago when the General Assembly proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But the UN is all we have and the Palais des Nations is the only place where victims can go and literally confront their oppressors eye to eye during meetings of the Human Rights Commission. The UN must be made to work.
It is a crucial but exciting moment in the international human rights movement. There is momentum and if Mrs Robinson can tap in on that the UN Human Rights Programme can begin to succeed. And at the end of the day the real success will belong to each and every one of us who can look at our children and say: "You have a decent world to grow up and be happy in". - Yours, etc.,
Fermoy, Co Cork.