Sir, - I congratulate you on highlighting the state of respect and otherwise in which human rights are held worldwide (The Irish Times, December 19th) and on celebrating the 50th anniversary of the construction of the UN Charter of Human Rights. However, a timely and fundamental review is badly needed of the methodologies and efficiencies employed to process what should be an expanding and deepening world vision.
Failures to practice the measures in the 30 outlined articles is depressing. Obvious failures in Ireland and the West in general range from substance abuse, crime, violence, poverty and ignorance to the horrors of Bosnia and Rwanda and Indonesia in the wider world.
Given the preamble imperative that "a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance for the full realisation of this pledge", we must surely ask questions about the efficacy of how we explain these articles.
A good measure of the understanding of any principle is how it is practised. I would propose that the record of practice is poor because the vision verbally contained these articles is ambiguous, sterile, one-sided and poor.
Rights are a receipt from someone else. There cannot anywhere be a right without a parallel, reciprocal, concomitant discharging of responsibility (obligation, duty) by somebody else. To allude to rights for anybody or any group without at the same time explaining who or from where these rights accord is fundamentally flawed. Being eloquent about rights and dyslexic about responsibilities verges on criminality. It is a psychological/educational fudge to fail to explain the other side of this coin.
The UN document appears to describe rights as commodities rather than a social practice. The UN should not try to reinvent the wheel. In its first article it weakly alludes to the obligation that "all human beings ... should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood". Even the language is sexist (surely a simple issue for Mary Robinson to correct).
The cognitive, psychological and ultimately cultural truth of the matter must be that greater and greater numbers of people will unashamedly bypass their responsibilities unless these are explained with the same vehemence and precision. Each article must identify, exhort and advert to with the same moral force the person or persons who must accord these rights. The best guarantee that rights are received is that they are granted. "Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Responsibilities" might be a beginning. Mary Robinson's "inclusiveness" must be put to print, rather than the complacency she expressed about the document on BBC 2 on Sunday, December 13th.
If this is attempted much of the abstraction will disappear and people universally will see and feel that the distant land of human rights abuses is almost always our own. This somebody else is almost always directly or indirectly ourselves. The imperative is to discharge these rights to others. The modern powerful tool of behaviour modification, namely educational advertising, must be harnessed by the state and the UN to drive home this elementary cultural principle.
In conclusion I would suggest that the wisdom and successful experience of the great religious movements of history should be employed rather than ignored. Christianity has 10 moral and material imperatives simplified as "Love God ... and love thy neighbour as thyself." This was a command and not a dispirited, anaemic wish.. - Yours, etc., Ronnie Owens,
Chamberstown, Slane, Co Meath.