Rene Cassin Mr. President, May I first convey to you and to the members of the Decalogue Lawyers Society my gratitude for your kind invitation which was relayed to me in Paris by my friend Wourgast of the World Federation of War Veterans. You are doing me a great honor be conferring on me the 1970 annual award – the highest distinction of your Society. This is my first visit to Chicago, but I could not resist your gracious invitation and am therefore here in person to accept the Decalogue Award - this valued testimony to the most ancient code of social morality, established and accepted through the remotest ages of our cultural consciousness and still as timely today as in the past. My friends and comrades in the struggle for the rights of man, - humanity, though fragmented into tribes and other social groups at first and later formed into nations and empires, was conscious from its darkest and earliest beginnings of a brotherhood founded on religious and moral concepts rather than on material and economic interests. The Decalogue is one of the earliest formally recorded expressions of this community of principles. It was formulated, however as a series of imperative precepts: "Ye shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy. Honor thy father and thy mother. Keep the sabbath day." Or else in the form of interdictions: "Thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain." But never was it meant to appear as a proclamation of human rights or prerogatives. For thousands of years the religious organization of society made itself felt as an authoritarian concept – even when altruistic precepts were involved: The Bible reads "thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." It was not until much later, under the profound influence of moralists and political philosophers, that the concept of limited power came into existence together with the notion of the unconquerable dignity of Man. Through the ages, an unwritten code of law granted the individual in his endless struggle against the authority in power and in his dealings with his peers, certain natural and inalienable rights which slowly and gradually came to be formulated and confirmed. Not until the Renaissance do we find acceptance of concepts of freedom of thought, opinion and intellectual creation. And we must await the 17th and 18th centuries to have the individual attain certain well-defined legal and political rights and prerogatives in his dealings with the state. The affirmation of personal freedom as well as the principle of equal rights for all men were later to be confirmed and proclaimed under the French Revolution and in your American Bill of Rights. For centuries Christianity lived with the reality of slavery, permitting inequities that haunt us until this very day. And women too were long excluded from legal equality with men. With recent scientific discoveries the whole structure of our social and political lives has changed. With increased and accelerated means of communication and travel, a new era has opened up before us, permitting, as never before the free exchange of people and goods and ideas. We must consider also that the tragic suffering visited on whole continents and the peoples of the entire world on a scale never dreamed of before, created a manner of solidarity for good and for evil – a common responsibility for the barbarous acts committed, a solidarity also of all men of good will in the face of such crimes and united in a common desire to put an end to such acts of violence and destruction. The universal Declaration adopted by the United Nations in 1948 represents the written protest and an affirmation of human protest and an affirmation of human consciousness. It formulates man’s urgent desire to emerge from the holocaust. It is the voice of millions of human beings, victims of oppression, misery and ignorance, who aspire to live under conditions of greater justice, freedom and simple dignity. It so happens that this Declaration of the Rights of the Man coincided, or almost, with man’s mastery of nuclear power and of outer space. In other words, with humanity’s cry for delivery from human bondage and its increased power over the forces of nature we cannot help but see the emergence of a new consciousness, an important stage of human evolution. Actually, man’s new and fuller power over the forces of nature, brings with it the responsibility to use this new strength more wisely than in the past. And with the continuing increase in population comes the added concern to allot to all members of the human race the fundamental rights to which they are entitled. At the same time, these rights imply a new sense of the family, the social group, the nation, the continents and, in the final analysis, the globe on which our closer knit human society must learn to live together. It is in the light of these facts that we must consider the problem of the rights of man in our contemporary age. Today, environmental influences exert such powerful pressures on all our lives that equally powerful safeguards are essential to protect the individual morally and materially from the onslaught of goods and ideas with which he is overwhelmed. Economic, social and cultural rights – and more especially in the fields of labor and education – must be enforced as strictly as those pertaining to our legal and political rights and freedoms. Even in the realm of religious thought and practice, vital changes have taken place. Whereas in former times religion was solely concerned with the spiritual salvation of humanity, today, its role has immeasurably increased so that it now holds itself responsible for preventing injustice, violence and all the ills capable of weakening the texture of our social fabric and engulfing all those human rights and prerogatives which we now consider essential to the dignity of Man. Let us clearly understand that the very structure and stratification of society has shifted and disintegrated to a large extent. While the state does still preserve onto itself those basic prerogatives that enable it to enforce the minimum essentials of orderly and disciplined collective existence. However, while the overall attributes of the State have in fact immeasurably increased in our world today, it no longer wields sovereign power or rights over those it governs. Today, nations are no longer the sole members of a universal society, nor are they alone subject to international law. In our time, all human beings are members in good standing of this society. It therefore becomes essential that nations submit and subordinate themselves to a superior law in such a way that the entire human society be allowed to exert its influence towards peace and against oppression in all its forms, against nameless violence such as GENOCIDE – that is to say the save destruction of entire groups and segments of our society. Dear comrades in the struggle for the right and the rights of man, we all know that the progress realized in this direction is extremely arduous and slow because it is impeded by prejudice deeply rooted for hundreds if not thousands of years. The Universal Declaration for the Rights of Man was prepared and voted by the United Nations over a period of 18 months. The drafting of the general agreements governing the United Nations Charter were promised to the peoples of the world during the recent world conflict, that is to say some 18 years ago. In fact, these agreements among nations have not been put into effect since 1966 because they were not properly ratified by various member nations. No one can possibly hope that the mere ratification of these agreements would suffice to enforce the essential rights of Man. Surely, many other considerations of a moral, economic and legal nature would first need to be fulfilled. And as long as these prerequisites have not been met, the United Nations Charter will remain an illusion, an empty shell. As a generation that has witnessed two world wars and other bloody conflicts, we surely cannot afford to fail in our struggle for human rights. We are depending also on the youth of today to pursue the task that we have undertaken at the cost of such heavy sacrifice. As for me, I am ready to fight on to the end at the side of men of good will, for truly we cannot stop now. With funds derived from the Nobel Prize, we have recently established in Strasbourg, France, a World Institute for the Rights of Man. The role of his institution will be to educate young people of all nations and infuse them with the knowledge and desire to defend the fundamental human rights. In view of the great importance of this undertaking and all that is here at stake, I invite each and every one of you to join with us in thus endeavor – each at his level and rank in our society and according to his means. Let us fervently hope that the scientific and material progress of our age will serve to reduce the sum total of injustice and of violence still abroad in the world and lead us on to new heights of achievement and the true freedom of all men! The above speech was given on March 7, 1970 by Rene Cassin at the Decalogue Lawyers Society annual dinner, which honors the winner of the society's highest distinction--the Decalogue Award. |