PRESIDENT MICHAEL D Higgins has described Ireland’s election to the United Nation’s body for human rights as “an honour”.
Higgins said the decision to give Ireland a seat on the UN’s Human Rights Council (UNHRC) was a strong endorsement of Ireland’s international reputation.
Saying that membership was both an honour and a responsibility which he was confident Ireland would embrace fully, Higgins said the move will also allow Ireland to play an even more active role in the promotion and protection of human rights worldwide – noting the country’s existing “uniqueness and a long tradition in the field of human rights protection.”
Higgins described the conversation on human rights as “perhaps one of the most important discourses of our times”:
It is important at a national level and at a global level, but that discourse is itself a space of contestation with such questions as to how we are to source such rights, how universality might be achieved, the importance of the inclusivity and the indivisibility of human rights, the contradictions that arise if culture is to be taken into account but yet in such a way as not to concede such conditionalities as would strip human rights of their essential protections. Culture must never become a shield for the denial of fundamental human rights.
Speaking at the Human Rights Commission’s Annual Lecture, the president referred to the poet Seamus Heaney, who he said had before spoken of “the dignity of the individual and the powerful moral and philosophical thought and texts that lay behind the first principle of the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”
I share the view that Seamus Heaney and so many others hold as to the moral significance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It references a strong philosophical tradition, and one that is not simply idealist, but empowering in its promise and emancipatory in its effect. In the minds of so many it is an achievable, and, we must all welcome the fact that it has been a real contribution to peace and reconciliation in post conflict societies, as we ourselves know.
Higgins said the concept of human rights, as enshrined in the Universal Declaration on Human Rights 1948 and the International Covenants on Civil and Political Rights and on Economic and Social Rights in 1966 as well as the subsequent conventions, stands in opposition to racial discrimination, discrimination against women, torture, and in support of the rights of the child and the rights of those with a disability.
However, he warned that the State’s new Human Rights and Equality Commission would always have unfinished business to deal with, including issues of equality of participation in the fullest sense both in terms of gender and in terms of minorities. He added that, as a concept, human rights was “evolving” and must adapt to meet the challenges of a changing society.
“As the IHRC moves into a new phase with its planned merger with the Equality Authority, it looks forward to continuing to work for the protection and promotion of human rights and equality for all, acting independently of Government, and achieving recognition through the quality and authority of its work.”
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