By GEORGE SIPOS
FOR SALT SPRING FORUM
Any of us who have been alive a while can, if asked to name transformative inventions in the world within the last 80 years, come up with a number of obvious ones.
Gadgetry will come to mind, everything from the internet, to smart phones, to satellite communications and the like. In medicine, the invention of antibiotics, transplant surgery, MRNA vaccines, etc. have revolutionized the quality of life for many of us.
But what about ideas, especially ideas in the social and political realm?
We may not immediately think of the idea of human rights as an invention, but it did come about as a distinct formal concept in 1948 when the newly born United Nations created and adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
After the horrors of World War II, the world for the first time articulated an explicit belief that all human beings share common, inherent and inalienable rights and freedoms by virtue of being human. But beyond simply believing this, United Nations member countries wanted to codify the concept in the form of international human rights law.
Ah, you say, that’s where the problem arises. Law is only useful if it can be enforced. And the last 80 or so years of world history have shown that disregard of human rights has been all too common, and injustices have tainted the fabric of the benevolent world we had hoped would emerge in time.
Not for want of trying, however. The UN’s Human Rights Council has worked tirelessly on a global scale to promote international treaties and legal mechanisms such as the International Criminal Court, criminal tribunals in the aftermath of genocides in Rwanda and the Balkans, and so on.
Perhaps more significantly, the idea of universal human rights has led to the emergence of international non-governmental organizations whose purpose is to fight for the acceptance of human rights as the moral and legal basis of world order.
Last October, Kenneth Roth, former director of one such important NGO, Human Rights Watch, visited the Salt Spring Forum and spoke about many decades of its work around the world to defend human rights.
On Wednesday, May 13, the forum will present Alex Neve, who spent 20 years as Secretary General of Amnesty International Canada, another crucial NGO whose initial focus was defending imprisoned and abused individual rights activists in many countries. Over the years its scope has grown to engaging with human rights issues more broadly.
Arising from this work, Alex Neve has just published a book: Universal – Renewing Human Rights in a Fractured World, which is a compilation of his 2025 CBC Massey Lectures.
In light of the acute conflicts currently ongoing in the Middle East, Ukraine, Sudan and elsewhere, the forum event will be both very informative and, unfortunately, all too topical.
The Neve event takes place on Wednesday, May 13 at 7:30 p.m. at Fulford Hall.
A link to tickets can be found at saltspringforum.com.