The world is marking an important anniversary: the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
After the Second World War, this was supposed to be our "never again" moment. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights promises us the right to live, to freedom of expression, the right not to be tortured, to equality regardless of gender, race or religion.
So how’s that working out?
Throughout 2023 SWI swissinfo.ch has been talking to the men and women who have led the United Nations' human rights work. In this edition of Inside Geneva, we highlight those exclusive interviews.
Please have a look at this video interview of Volker Türk, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Why does protecting human rights matter more than ever?
Please listen and subscribe to our science podcast -- the Swiss Connection.
Get in touch!
Thank you for listening! If you like what we do, please leave a review or subscribe to our newsletter.
The world is marking an important anniversary: the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
After the Second World War, this was supposed to be our "never again" moment. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights promises us the right to live, to freedom of expression, the right not to be tortured, to equality regardless of gender, race or religion.
So how’s that working out?
Throughout 2023 SWI swissinfo.ch has been talking to the men and women who have led the United Nations' human rights work. In this edition of Inside Geneva, we highlight those exclusive interviews.
Please have a look at this video interview of Volker Türk, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Why does protecting human rights matter more than ever?
Please listen and subscribe to our science podcast -- the Swiss Connection.
Get in touch!
Thank you for listening! If you like what we do, please leave a review or subscribe to our newsletter.
This is Inside Geneva. I'm your host, imogenfolks, and this is a Swiss Info production. In today's programme, it is safe to say that the declaration before us may be destined to occupy an honourable place in the procession of positive landmarks in human history.
Speaker 2:We stand today at the threshold of a great event, both in the life of the United Nations and in the life of mankind. This Universal Declaration of Human Rights may well become the international Magna Carter of all men everywhere.
Speaker 1:Hello and welcome again to Inside Geneva. I'm Imogenfolks. Now, as many of our listeners may know, it's 75 years since the world united around a groundbreaking document the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Speaker 3:What has to happen in this world so that we come to this never-again attitude?
Speaker 1:It was supposed to be the world's definitive, never-again moment. The terrible violence and brutality of the Second World War would be consigned to history. So how's that working out Inside Geneva, asked the men and women who have led the UN's human rights work over the years.
Speaker 4:Yes, it is an impossible mission to try to guarantee all human rights social, economic and political, cultural of the whole people of the world.
Speaker 5:I remember feeling to myself I'm going to get on top of this somehow. This job is impossible. Everything is very, very difficult. It's extremely hard work. I'm somehow going to get on top of it, and it got better.
Speaker 6:The United States has not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child or CEDAW Convention Against Discrimination of Women, and they told me that's because they're a democracy, they have their own institutions.
Speaker 1:How do you confront governments who are violating human rights, especially if they are superpowers?
Speaker 7:To be the megaphone for the denunciation of injustices at some point becomes counterproductive, because it just illuminates how impotent the system is.
Speaker 8:Someone asked me possibly even you asked me about Donald Trump, and I said, yes, I think he is dangerous, and that became the headline out of the press conference.
Speaker 9:There was lots of pressure and lots of criticism, but you know what? There was this saying in the office when everybody criticizes, they're not going back.
Speaker 1:In today's edition, we're going to hear highlights of those in-depth interviews. The job of UN Human Rights Commissioner has been called the UN's hardest no handing out food, medicines or shelter. Instead, the human rights chief has to tell governments when they're treating their citizens badly. So why take the job? Let's start with Jose Ayala Lasso. A diplomat from Ecuador, he became the very first commissioner when the job was created in the mid-1990s.
Speaker 4:Indeed, I was always, during my diplomatic career, interested in human rights and I dedicated my life in diplomacy to work for establishing a new international order with recognition of the obligations of the states. Regarding the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, there was a sort of different depraved decisions about the validity of the declaration. Some people say that it was a declaration. It is a non-compulsory obligatory law for the states. Others consider that the principles established in the declaration were so important that they should be applied as a law which does not meet the acceptance of the states but they have the force to impose. So I tried to support this second position.
Speaker 1:Let me come to your time in office. While you were UN Human Rights Commissioner, there was a rebanda. This must have been very difficult.
Speaker 4:Indeed, I took office on the beginning of March, if I remember it well, and less than a week after taking office in Geneva, I was observing what was happening in Rwanda and it was absolutely necessary to do something. So I decided to go to Rwanda to see what can I do. What could I do in those circumstances? My office was not yet really established, I had not a dollar and I went with two advisors, and what I saw in Rwanda was terrible. I was obliged to work together with General Canadian, the Chief of the German Forces, in a lands where you found hundreds and thousands of people in the most outrageous manner, but it was terrible.
Speaker 4:The impression I received was an impression of drama, of criminality, of not to believe in human nature, in goodness of human nature, but that was my sentimental reaction. I was also an administrative officer of the United Nations and I was obliged to do something to resolve the problem. The only actions I considered useful in those moments were to talk with the government, which was presided by the Hutus, and to talk with the chief of the Rebellion, general Kagami Tutsi.
Speaker 1:You said, you reacted in a. You described it sentimentally, a human way, many would say. But you also had to do something. But still, confronted by what you saw in Rwanda, Did you ever wonder what's the point? Can I achieve anything?
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah. When I was appointed, many officers of the United Nations ambassadors and of the American government offered a dinner to me and one of the senators of the United States made a speech and he said to me in the speech you have accepted an impossible mission. And I said yes, it is an impossible mission to try to guarantee the effectiveness of all human rights social, economical, political, cultural, even the right to development of the whole people of the world. I said that is an impossible, but something should begin ["The Human Rights Hot Seat"].
Speaker 1:Ayala Lasso was the beginner. Next in the human rights hot seat, Ireland's Mary Robinson.
Speaker 5:Well, I grew up in the West of Ireland. My parents were both medical doctors, though my mother didn't practice as a GP. After five of us arrived in six years in a good Catholic tradition I was wedged between those brothers and that gave me a very early interest in human rights and gender equality and using my elbows and everything it took, because my parents would say to me over and over again you have the same opportunities, we will give you the same chances. We will be, regardless, totally equal to your four brothers. But our society wasn't doing that.
Speaker 1:Mary Robinson became a lawyer, then president of Ireland, and then she was asked to become UN Human Rights Chief.
Speaker 5:All my knowledgeable friends said Mary, I wouldn't take that job. Anyway, when I arrived in Geneva I found that our office was in the back of the Palais des Nations, a very low position, and I went on a very difficult trip back to Rwanda where I had had three welcomed visits as president of Ireland. But when I arrived wearing my UN hat they utterly disregarded and in effect kind of humiliated me. I had difficulty meeting Kagami, whom I had met at all the other visits.
Speaker 1:Why do you think that was?
Speaker 5:Because of the UN record, they were very anti-UN. When I went back to Ireland after that visit to Uganda first and then Rwanda and then South Africa I was exhausted. I was taking sleeping pills and I was actually my mental health was being affected. And I had a brother, a doctor, and said, mary, you're on the verge of a mental breakdown. And when I heard my brother saying that I thought no, I'm not, no way, and I threw away the sleeping pills and I kind of took another fortnight to rest and I came back and I remember feeling to myself I'm going to get on top of this somehow. This job is impossible. Everything is very, very difficult. It's extremely hard work, but I'm somehow going to get on top of it. And it got better.
Speaker 1:But just the second person to hold the job she still found. She had to struggle to get human rights on the UN's agenda.
Speaker 5:Kofi Annan had introduced his reform. He took up the post in January 1997, some months earlier, and in July he had this reform package which he had highlighted the importance of four areas peace and security, development, economic and humanitarian. And he said human rights has to be part of all of those. So the High Commissioner of Human Rights, uniquely, would be a member of all four. Well, I can tell you, when I was there, human rights was spoken about. When I was not there, nobody else was speaking about human rights. So nobody else was there to speak about human rights.
Speaker 5:So I gave a Romana's lecture in Oxford and I said that the United Nations had lost the plot on human rights and I gave chapter and verse of some of the problems. And the following morning I got a call from my boss saying Mary, you can't criticize the UN, you're in the UN now. And I said well, when you appointed me, kofi or Secretary General, you said I should remain an outsider, mentally, for as long as possible. And he said, no, no, you can't criticize the UN when you're in it. And I said well, I'm going to do my job as best I can and left to do that.
Speaker 1:Do you see that, looking back, as perhaps one of your biggest achievements is helping the UN refined the plot on human rights?
Speaker 5:I think, possibly helping to do that because, over and over again, I kept saying to myself I represent the first three words of the Charter of the United Nations. We, the peoples. That's what I represent, not the states. I realized I had no power as such, I had no big stick, I had no executive way of trying to get people to do what I dearly wanted them to do. So the only way that I could bring attention to human rights problems was going there, and I found myself hugely. My batteries would get charged by the belief in human rights of those who knew, because they were deprived of their rights, how important they were, whether they were voting rights, whether they were, you know, economic and social rights, whether they were rights to a fair, uncorrupt political system, whatever.
Speaker 1:With the start of the new millennium, it was Louise Arbor of Canada's turn to take the job.
Speaker 7:I was educated in an extremely homogeneous environment, in a kind of girls Catholic convent school that became a classical college, and so essentially I was educated by women. I was raised by my mother, just with my brother. My father left when I was quite young and then I was educated by nuns with a bunch of girls until I was 20 years old and went to law school. So maybe my interest in pluralism and may come in reaction to having been so cloister Is that the word or sort of restricted in my horizons when I was growing up.
Speaker 1:Arbor had already combined her legal training with human rights serving on the International Tribunal for former Yugoslavia. She indicted former serve leader Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes.
Speaker 7:I would have never thought that in my lifetime criminal law would take this international positioning. After the Nuremberg trials in Tokyo, despite all kinds of multilateral efforts, it looked like this was not gonna happen. And then, frankly, quite miraculously, when you think of it, the Security Council of the United Nations, of all places, of all political places, added criminal law to its otherwise pretty empty toolbox of conflict management. Now, this had nothing to do with me, but it was revolutionary. I don't think the Security Council has done anything that imaginative since, and that's why the indictment of Milosevic was important.
Speaker 7:If I did not firmly believe that one day he would stand trial in the Hague, I wouldn't waste my time doing this really hard job. I'd move on and do something that is more anchored in reality. It was anchored in reality, even though at the time I signed the indictment I could not have written the script on how this would all unfold. But I was really persuaded. You know the long arm of the law, the law is very patient and, yes, and I still feel the same way today and, like Mary, Robinson, she wasn't sure about the UN human rights job.
Speaker 1:Unlike a lawyer or a judge, the UN human rights chief can't prosecute or sentence.
Speaker 7:When you arrive in the role of commissioner for human rights. I think that's part of the dilemma how do you use your voice? Because I think to be the megaphone for the denunciation of injustices at some point becomes counterproductive, because it just illuminates how impotent the system is. It's like you scream in the wilderness and it yields absolutely no remedial action.
Speaker 1:Interestingly, just earlier today I was talking to somebody about the fact that we're going to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Do you think this century there has been maybe dating from 9-11, an erosion? Do we care about them less? Do we respect them less?
Speaker 7:Yes, yes, I don't think we're in a particularly good place, which doesn't mean that the project is over and we should just abandon an ideal that I still believe is more than worth pursuing. I think the human rights framework as an organizing principle for humanity is unbeatable. I think it's more than a worthwhile project and I see a couple of fault lines in the project. The dominance of the Western embrace of the agenda has had, I think, two consequences. The first one is, as the West was promoting its so-called values, others started to notice that, happily for the West, its values always coincided with its interests, which I think generated a lot of skepticism about the bona fides of the entire enterprise. I think that's the first consequence.
Speaker 7:And the second one is the West and I say the West I mean we understand each other. I mean we, europe, america we're always in a position of asking others to do something that was hard for them to do. But when it came a time where the West was asked to do something that was hard for it to do, it choked, and the examples of, I think, the post-911 world showed how the US was very quick to even reconsider fundamental norms like the absolute prohibition on torture All of a sudden. Well, it was just so inconvenient that it could be overlooked. And now, if we look at the entire migration agenda, it's even more apparent how, for once, when Europe and America are asked and that includes Canada, are asked to do something that's hard for them to do, this time, there are nowhere to be seen.
Speaker 1:Was it time, then, for a human rights chief from the global South? South Africa's Navi Pele was next.
Speaker 6:We grew up under apartheid and we realized there's something very unfair here Our teachers were afraid to talk about. They would teach us democracy in Greece, but not. Why don't we have democracy in South Africa? Because if they did touch on any subject that the regime thought was political, the teachers would lose their jobs, and I know one who was summarily fired and all she did was cut out press cuttings of topical news and put it up on a chart in her classroom. This was in high school. So therefore, the fear about something not right out there and the urge to do something about it, we were, I think, quite an alert lot there in high school.
Speaker 1:Like Arbor, Pele was a lawyer, and she had also served on an international tribunal, this one for Rwanda, and she too turned down the human rights job when first offered it.
Speaker 6:So I said no because I had already packed my winter coats away. I was coming back home to sunny South Africa where I would have had the opportunity to serve on the constitutional court. That was my plan and when, bankimoon, the secretary general interviewed me, he said no, no, no. We need you now. The states need you. We can't not have a high commissioner. You know you have to respond to a call that's made to you, a trust that people place in you. Really, I mean, these look like highly laudable goals. So, if you ask me so, what moved me from where I wanted to go to this was the secretary general saying we need you now. What?
Speaker 1:looking back, what were your biggest challenges, or do you have standout successes? I mean, this is a hard job in the sense that you have to tell governments they're behaving badly.
Speaker 6:I'll tell you what they said to me. And back to this, and you know, politicians, heads of state and so on. They respected that I was a judge and, as a judge, that I listen. So even Israel complimented me in bringing a balance, meaning I included their point of view in my report. That's what you have to do. You stick to the UN principles. I would constantly remind them. You passed this international convention, yeah, and you have undertaken obligations, so you have to carry that out.
Speaker 1:Did you feel the big, powerful countries we could say China, russia, the United States did they escape scrutiny because of their power?
Speaker 6:They do they? Do you know? I mean, the United States has not ratified the convention on the rights of the child or CEDAW, or convention against discrimination of women, and they told me that's because they're a democracy. They have their own institutions, but they do escape international scrutiny that they push for in respect of other states. Yes, there is some double standards there. People need to be reminded that they have a role to play. So if a good law is passed nationally or internationally, it's not going to be implemented.
Speaker 6:It's not governments who woke up one day and decided, oh, we've got to do more for human rights. No, it's really skewed. It's bad in the lack of accountability by politicians as soon as they get into power. I often wonder, for instance, why do they need so much security for themselves against us, the people? It should be the other way around. You don't need to surround yourself with security as if we, the people, are going to attack them. I think, then, for after 75 years of this, there has to be a revolutionary change where people should realize their own power and worth and reassert and demand that they be included in all discussions. The collective opposition to apartheid. I see all these as victories, of having this universal declaration of human rights, a common standard that every state actually has agreed. No state has distanced itself from that city. So I see hope in that and I feel these are the tools that civil society has.
Speaker 1:So we're beginning to see maybe a pattern Dedicated people who take the job even though they know it hasn't got much power apart from the power to speak out. Our next human rights chief, zaid Radal Hussein from Jordan, became famous for that, though he admits he didn't think much about human rights growing up.
Speaker 8:No, I was far too immature and delinquent to be thinking lofty ideas and profound thoughts. It really was my first proper working experience after I did my military service in Jordan, which took me to UN peacekeeping, and two years of service in the Balkans, from early 1994 to early 1996, that first exposed me to the enormity of atrocity crimes, the overwhelming emotional response. One feels the revulsion, one experiences the senselessness of it all. There's nothing that can justify killing or destruction like that, nothing at all.
Speaker 1:So when he arrived in Geneva, Zaid was determined to make the human rights agenda loud and clear.
Speaker 8:I knew from my experience in the former Yugoslavia that if the UN secretariat believed and I think mistakenly that it's in the friends business, it produces catastrophic results. The UN is not there to become friendly with the member states. We were in the respect business, not in the friends business. For me it mattered little whether they hated me or they disliked me or so forth. I think the point was, were they wary of me enough to take me seriously and to respond in kind? And I think that's what matters. And if you're concerned about maintaining easy relationships or being comfortable, then that's not the job for you. I'm sorry, I amats my view of it. I sort of felt I knew I could push and governments could take it. And in many respects ambassadors would come after the telling off that I would give them, would come up to me privately and say you know my government deserved it. And thank you for saying it and I'm going to oppose you publicly, but it was the right thing to say.
Speaker 1:You very famously made a speech about xenophobes, populists and racists, and you were talking about political leaders Victor Orban in Hungary, nigel Farage UK and, notably, donald Trump in the United States.
Speaker 8:Yeah, it was halfway through my term as high commissioner and I think from the initial two years, I thought, well, whoever the high commissioner is, you're going to have and face ad hominem attacks, even if you were only to speak critically of the conduct of states when they were violating the rights of their own people and very much against the obligations that they themselves took on.
Speaker 8:And I think I got to halfway and I thought, well, it's not pointed enough. And it's not just governments, because governments are not monolithic structures, it's individuals who had these governments who pour this poison into their societies. And it's a well-known poison, it's not a new poison what they're doing. And so I felt, when I had the occasion to speak in the Hague, I felt it was the right time to, and I think I was, yes, the first, if not the only UN official to go after these leaders, or so-called leaders, because they may be leaders in official sense, in official sense but there's nothing about them that I think you know, there's very little about them that I'd want to see in my own children. I mean, you know they're opposite of someone like Nelson Mandela, who's a real leader. You know someone who you deeply respect.
Speaker 1:In response to Donald Trump on the campaign trail saying that he would torture you, suggested that his election could be dangerous. Do you think that prediction?
Speaker 8:was proven right. Yeah, I think so. I mean, I remember the occasion. You may even have been there. There was a press conference, I think. I spoke for about an hour and a half about everything else and then someone asked me possibly even you asked me about Donald Trump, and I said, yes, I think he's dangerous, and that became the headline out of the press conference. I mean, how could you not think that? I mean, how could anyone not think that Anyone, any thinking person, that is, everyone brings their own style to the job.
Speaker 1:But our next human rights chief brought what no one else had her own personal experience of repression and violations. Michelle Batchlet grew up under Chile's violent military dictatorship, but always believed in human rights.
Speaker 9:Yes, even though maybe at that time people would have told me I might not call it human rights because probably I was not so aware about the concepts and the universal decorations and so on. But since I was a child I was always trying to, if I would say, ensure that people will receive the dignity they deserve.
Speaker 1:But those views in 1970s Chile could be dangerous. Bachelet's father, who supported a constitutional democracy, was arrested.
Speaker 9:My father was in prison. He died because of torture. And I mean he was in prison because he was a constitutionalist, he was against the coup d'etat and the military itself. They took him and tortured him so he had a heart attack and he died because of the heart attack in the ILO jail. And then, of course, we were against the dictatorship, so we did political work, underground, of course. So once my mother was a friend of my mom I, she and the doctor gave the name of my mother, and then they went home and they took me and my mom to be at the emergency that's a doctor center.
Speaker 9:I mean what you did alone at that time, when you were in those places that you were disappeared. Your family didn't know where you were. The thing is not to know what's going to happen, how long that is going to last, what will be. I mean, of course, they separated me from my man as well, so I didn't know who she was and yeah. But on the other hand, you felt that all both things were so also what was going on in the country, that you needed to be as strong as possible and not to fail and not to how could I say confess things that would harm others.
Speaker 1:When democracy returned to Chile, bachelet became a successful politician, serving twice as her country's president. Then, just as she was planning to spend more time with her family, un Secretary General Antonio Guterres asked her to become human rights chief.
Speaker 9:The beginning I was saying to him look, my mom was old the truth is that living in my family for a long time in a second place, but the situation was very difficult in the world. It was not as bad as it was getting worse, but it was very difficult. So he told me please, michelle, please apply, because really I need you. And I asked, I talked to my mom. She was at that time like 90 years old and she said to me go ahead, go ahead, because this is very important and so on.
Speaker 1:Bachelet began to research what the job required.
Speaker 9:I started meeting and one of the articles that really it said was the possible job, because the head commissioner has to be the voice of the boss. So we have to denounce situations. That needs to be known and try to ensure that governments do the right thing. But on the other hand, you need to support governments, you need to be trusted there. It's a very conscious because if you're telling you are a bad guy, I thought bad government because you are violating the rights of your people. But on the other hand, as then, I want to support you. In that sense, I feel that the political experience is very useful to that, because you had to negotiate or to put yourself in the shoes of the other.
Speaker 1:Most complex of all the UN's approach to China and widespread evidence of oppression of the Uyghur Muslim community. Bachelet had commissioned a report, but then waited and waited to publish it.
Speaker 9:This came from everywhere Every time I had meeting with the European Union the question will come and ready then when you come and such. So, probably because I understand what politics is and what geopolitics is, I knew they were no-transcript, I knew this would happen anyway. And I used to tell them look, if you ask me not to publish this, then tomorrow another big country will call me, said no, publish this, and then the other big country will come. So then the only thing I can do is to hold back on Because I have to do my job. I have to.
Speaker 9:If I commit to something, what would do it? And I won't give it to my successor the three tasks of doing it. I would. It might take me long, because I needed to be serious, professional, to give the opportunities to everyone to give their arguments and their experiences, and then we needed to make something that we feel it is serious. So there was lots of pressure, lots of criticism, but you know what there was this saying in the office when everybody criticizes they're not going back. It's only one person who criticizes you to do it at 30 years of the war. But if everybody thinks that, ok, you're trying to do your thing, so it will not be easy, but I think you need to do what you need.
Speaker 1:The report came out on Batchelit's last day in office. It was serious, hard hitting, suggesting Beijing's treatment of Uyghurs could be a crime against humanity. But the delay overshadowed her other work challenging institutional racism, and it highlighted again the challenge UN human rights faces when superpowers become violators. And now Austrian Falker Twerk has been in the job for a year. He's determined to get back to basics. He even has a fraying copy of the Universal Declaration in his office, given to him at high school more than 40 years ago.
Speaker 3:In light of the history of my own country Holocaust, its own atrocities that was committed by Austrians during the Second World War it was very formative for me to actually really say, ok, what has to happen in this world so that we come to this never again attitude? So this, never again. The history of my country, the fact that we were on the edge of the Iron Curtain, were very, very important parts of my upbringing. The nuclear threat as well, I remember.
Speaker 3:As a child I was always very worried. I was always happy when the clouds were up there because I thought that there wouldn't be anything. So it was very strange, you know, because you were in this environment of threats as well, different threats than today, but nonetheless, as a child I could remember the fear about this and I always wanted to fight for peace. I was very early on interested in other cultures in other parts of the world and in human rights, and it started actually when I was 15-year-old. During my English classes, professor gave us a copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which I still keep up to this day. I will show you a complete sort of copy of it, which I still have.
Speaker 1:But Tuurk is confronted with huge challenges. There are 55 conflicts raging in the world right now. Some fear those rules and values we agreed on 75 years ago are crumbling.
Speaker 3:We cannot afford to see that. We cannot afford that human rights becomes the collateral damage of geopolitics or of any of the crisis that we see. I mean we still have 55 conflicts at the moment, one of the highest numbers since the end of the Second World War. About a quarter of humanity lives in violent, fragile conflict areas, which is horrifying. We have the traffic.
Speaker 3:I mean I want to make the comparison with traffic, because we actually have traffic regulations and they exist because otherwise people would get killed. That's the same on the human rights front and that's why the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is so important. Yes, there are people who are violating traffic regulations, as there are people who violate human rights law, sometimes egregiously, as we see now. It doesn't mean that this takes away the fundamental centrality of the norms, because if we didn't have the norms, we wouldn't even know what to measure it against and we wouldn't be able to hold people to account as well. So I think it's important to remember that, and I would see them more as temporary setbacks, terrible setbacks, but we cannot afford to lose the wisdom that comes from human rights norms.
Speaker 1:What and how, then, should we celebrate this 75th anniversary?
Speaker 3:We actually commemorate the 75th anniversary and it's really important that societies, member states, at different levels, everyone who is part of the ecosystem, reflects on the achievements the successes, but also the failures and learns from them. And we need to look also into the future. We cannot afford just to stay in the present. We need to learn from our crisis today to make it better in the future, and I hope that if there's one single message that comes across that the centrality of human rights has to be much more pronounced than ever before.
Speaker 1:Who could disagree? Certainly not all are former human rights chiefs.
Speaker 6:You have the law. Now push for implementation.
Speaker 4:Ask your governments the difficult questions we should not lose our faith in the capacity of human beings to act correctly.
Speaker 9:I mean the universal declaration is still valid because it gives sort of the minimal, if I would say, standards how we can live together.
Speaker 5:Human rights is the answer. Everyone has these core of human rights. All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights, but this is who we are.
Speaker 8:What we're aiming at is to create a better human being, and that's what we're trying to do with the human rights agenda just to better improve ourselves and our conduct.
Speaker 7:And who can argue with that? She came from another planet and just looked at the human rights framework, the universal declaration of human rights, all the treaties, the conventions, the work of the treaty bodies. You think you've arrived in heaven. Why is it not the case? Ha ha ["The World's Greatest Man"].
Speaker 1:Why. Indeed, that's a question we should all perhaps be asking our governments, our friends, our neighbors and ourselves. That brings us to the end of this edition of Inside Geneva. My thanks to all the human rights commissioners who so generously shared their time and their thoughts with me, and if what you've heard here has whetted your appetite, you can hear each of these exclusive interviews in full on Inside Geneva. Each has their own individual episode.
Speaker 1:You can find them wherever you get your podcasts, we hope the series has inspired you, our listeners, to think of ways to celebrate the universal declaration and to uphold human rights. You can tell us what you think of the series by writing to us at insidejenevaswissinfoch, and stay tuned for our next episode Out on December 26th. We'll bring you our annual journalists special UN correspondents. Tell us what they made of 2023 and what they predict for 2024. Don't miss it. A reminder you've been listening to Inside Geneva from Swiss Info, the international public media company of Switzerland, available in many languages as well as English. Check out our other content at wwwswissinfoch. I'm Imogen Folks. Thanks again for listening and do join us next time on Inside Geneva.