December 10, 2018 commemorate the seventy years the Universal Declaration of human rights, document that you established those rights inalienable and common to all human beings in its thirty articles. But, in these times in which we live, the question is what are human rights?
Week to week we see as they happen, one after the other, facts of infringement of these precepts established as common to all people. Entire communities in the slow agony of pollution, repression in La Araucanía, institutionalized xenophobia, social leaders who die under suspicious circumstances. The list adds and follows and is so painful that we would not continue.
In this scenario, one tends to have some hopelessness front human rights, since, while Chile has signed most of the international treaties that enshrine them (when our international policy was a policy of State and no Government and) hot flashes in the global arena were not so common) but that didn’t stop these events to happen. Then what are?
The answer to this question part to assume, understand and record heat in mind, that human rights were not ever, and will not be it now either, a gracious concession of power to their constituencies. They were people who were mobilized by them, social, legal and political victories which we have apparently forgotten. We treat them as an ethereal and immune to threats and attack his opponents, but unfortunately we see every day that if you are at risk. Let’s ask pensioners AFP what such their right to the property on their funds, to the machis which such their religious freedom and students for their freedom of opinion, surely your response will be daunting.
A few days ago the Under-Secretary of the Interior Rodrigo Ubilla said that for the Government there is no human right to migrate. Unfortunately, Undersecretary, it is not inventing the wheel with his statement, we have heard contrary voices to guarantee rights many times throughout history. “For us the right to women’s vote is not a human right” is a phrase that surely was in the mouth of many conservative leaders over the past century. The proposal to deny rights is often bad in retrospect, so once again must prescribe the Government prudence.
Prudence since it is not among their faculties denying human rights to the people, but even if it were, the own global compact for Migration (which is not a treaty and therefore does not oblige the State) does not establish it. His concern, Undersecretary, is non-existent. Perhaps it would be good, as they demand from foreigners who come as tourists to this country, you sinceren their true intentions to exclude from this instance.
The truth is that even in this bleak context, we can say that today more than ever, it makes sense, it is worth and is essential to the struggle for human rights. Because they come to life only when their owners, you, we, all, take them as own and we take care of them. If we observe undaunted as they are trampled underfoot, they are nothing more than words written in a role, no more important than a list of supermarket.
And above all, we must remember that perhaps even we are not born as free and as equal in dignity and rights as perhaps the signers imagined him seventy years ago, but yes they are endowed with reason and conscience, and we should behave fraternally with the other. And those others, these days, come from other lands.
Poured in this op-ed content is the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect the edi line politician or posture of the counter.
