Basic human rights are being violated on every continent and in every region of the world, a Nobel Prize winning authority on international law declared here. These violations, he added, must arouse a particularly strong reaction from Jews, who were the first people in the modern world to teach that the importance of the individual and his right to life were the fundamental values of civilization.
Rene Cassin, president of the International Institute of Human Rights, headquartered in Paris, and also president of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, made his remarks yesterday in the keynote speech of a three-day colloquium on “Judaism and Human Rights.” that will continue through tomorrow at McGill University here.
The international meeting, which has brought together more than 100 judges, lawyers, academicians, political scientists and human rights specialists from the United States, Canada, France, Mexico and Israel, is expected to be the first in a series that will examine the contributions of various religious groups to the development of human rights concepts. The colloquium is sponsored jointly by the Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights of the American Jewish Committee, the Canadian Jewish Congress, the Consultative Council of Jewish Organizations, and the International Institute of Human Rights.
Speaking in French. Cassin declared that “there is no region of the world that is exempt from the taint of violence, no continent that does not offer the spectacle of the violation of fundamental liberties.” The Middle East, he observed, is suffering under the oppression of “hardly masked slavery of entire populations under the heavy hand of despotic administrations that have no other concern than the well being of potentates.”
SCORES LATIN AMERICAN TOTALITARIAN GOVERNMENTS
He accused the nations of Africa of imposing dictatorships under the pretexts that they are necessary for economic development and that “democracy is a luxury that is difficult to extend to allegedly uncultured peoples.” He also pointed to the fact that tribal conflicts in Africa have resulted in “genocide or the imposition of slavery on entire populations.” and that such physical phenomena as drought have been exploited for the “personal enrichment of responsible leaders.”
Turning to the American hemisphere, he scored those nations of Latin America where totalitarian governments “imprison, torture, execute without trial men who thought it possible to create happiness for their people by different means than those that are the rule under the capitalist system.” In a brief reference to the United States, he deplored the fact that “underdevelopment and social exploitation are still the general rule in the richest land in the world.” All these violations of human rights, Cassin maintained, must evoke strong reactions in what he called the “Jewish conscience” because of the history and religious beliefs of the Jewish people.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
