Amnesty International has been working in recent weeks to highlight the impact of the planned withdrawl by the UN from Eastern Chad. Much more on this can be read at the Amnesty International Ireland site.
Amnesty International has a research mission on the ground in Chad at the moment and one of my colleagues, Alex Neve for Amnesty International Canada is a member of the team. Alex has blogged about the mission and I thought his perspective on this was compelling and so decided to add it here.
If you feel strongly about this, and I hope yo do, the please follow the link to the AI Ireland site and take action.
Abandoned Again? Chad Forces the UN Out of the Country
Abeché, Eastern Chad
May 23, 2010
We have begun our work on the ground in eastern Chad and in early days much of our focus is on the impending decision of the UN Security Council about the future of the critical UN mission here. Under pressure from the Chadian government, and with the conspicuous absence of the usual strong influence of Chad’s former colonial power, France, the Security Council is poised to agree to begin a pull out of UN troops from the east of the country, to be completed by mid-October. It could very well prove disastrous for human rights protection, development projects and overall security. And at this point in time it seems near irreversible.
My friend Celine Narmandji, a remarkably tenacious women’s human rights defender who I’ve worked with on missions here in the past, put it very well when we met for lunch right after my arrival in Chad. She said: “We were abandoned before. We’re going to be abandoned again. The good news is that in between, for a short while, the world did care about the situation in eastern Chad.”
Right she is, but we need better news than that.
I have been going back in my own mind, repeatedly, to the many women, men and young people I met during my first Amnesty mission to eastern Chad, in late 2006. They too talked about abandonment: in the face of a relentless wave of violence, much of it orchestrated from across the border in Darfur, hundreds of villages were razed, thousands of people killed, untold numbers of women and girls raped, and close to 200,000 Chadian chased from their homes. They felt abandoned by their own government and the rest of the world. And they were – there was no UN mission on the ground at that time. And Chadian authorities, who have long neglected and played politics with the east of the country, did nothing to prevent or respond to the devastating human rights violations. Abandonment was the right word.
Amnesty and others worked hard to end that abandonment. AI members – in Canada and worldwide – wrote letters, signed petitions and spoke out. And in March 2008 a UN mission, complete with military troops, began to fan out across this isolated and troubled region with a strong Security Council mandate to protect civilians. It was not easy. The UN mission faced numerous challenges and shortcomings – many of which Amnesty publicized, including after a mission I was part of back to the east last year. But now, just as the mission has begun to solidify and truly make a difference – the Chadian government has pulled the plug and the Security Council has meekly gone along for the ride.
The mandate of the current mission is set to expire on Wednesday of this week – May 26th; just 72 hours from when I’m recording this message. The writing is on the wall – a draft of the new resolution is circulating widely now, laying out a timetable for the UN’s quick withdrawal and taking away from the reduced numbers of UN troops that will remain for the next several months their mandate to take action to protect civilians. It is expected to be adopted before Wednesday.
Even as the hours draw to a close we must continue to press key governments – particularly France – to step back from the brink and refuse to go ahead with a precipitous UN pull out from a country that is, at best, beginning to enjoy fragile and very tentative improvements in human rights protection and security on the ground. I hope you will respond to AI’s email action targeting French president Nicolas Sarkozy.
It does appear that minds are made up.
But we are activists.
We certainly do not believe in abandonment.
And we do not remain silent – whatever the odds.
An opinion piece first published in the Irish Daily Mail on Jan 20th 2010
To find out more or to support Amnesty International click here.
On the 22nd of July 2002 a Gulfstream jet, registration number N379P, landed at Shannon Airport. It was owned by Premier Executive Transport Service, a front company operated by the CIA. Its crew overnighted in Shannon and flew out to Washington the next day, no doubt well rested.
This was not a normal stop over, like hundreds that take place every day at Shannon, this was a getaway.
A few months before this a young man called Binyam Mohamed was arrested in Pakistan at Karachi Airport. He was handed over to US custody and the CIA sent this jet to pick him up. It flew him to Morocco, where he was held in a secret detention centre for 18 months and brutally tortured, before flying home through Shannon.
“I tried to put on a brave face,” he said later. “But maybe I was going to be raped. Maybe they’d electrocute me. Maybe castrate me. They took a razor to my right chest. It was only a small cut. Maybe an inch. Then they cut my left chest.
“One of them took my penis in his hand and began to make cuts. He did it once, and they stood still for maybe a minute, watching my reaction. I was in agony, crying, trying desperately to suppress myself, but I was screaming.”
Eventually Binyam would end up in Guantánamo. Last February he was released after a total of nearly nine years in detention. He was never convicted of any crime.
‘Extraordinary rendition’ is one of those phrases like collateral damage that tries to hide what it is by sounding like something official, something legitimate but it is not.
It actually means CIA agents kidnap people in one country, sometimes using others to do their dirty work, and then secretly smuggle them to another country where they are generally held in secret. Once there they are interrogated, often tortured, either on the direct instructions or with the active participation of members of British and American intelligence.
While Guantánamo and renditions are the responsibility of the US, other countries made it possible. They allowed people to be transferred through their airports, took part in illegal detentions and kidnapping or, as in Ireland’s case, they allowed their territory to be used as a staging area for rendition operations.
The Irish Government says that no prisoners have ever been transported through Irish airspace. It knows this because President Bush says so. As our then Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, put it in 2006, “I looked at the great President Bush and said to him, I wanted to be sure, to be sure, and he assured me”.
I doubt many were as convinced. The British Government was given the same assurances Bertie was. They were told prisoners were not being transferred through their territory. However in 2008 the US Government admitted that planes carrying prisoners had landed at a British air base on at least two occasions.
The simple fact is this. We don’t know whether the CIA has transported boys and men through Shannon Airport to be imprisoned and tortured elsewhere. Neither does the Irish Government. No one knows because suspected rendition flights are not searched by the Gardaí. Planes known to be involved in kidnapping boys and men have routinely used our airspace and airports but we are told that checks are not necessary. Imagine if planes known to be involved in drug smuggling were passing through Shannon and the Gardaí didn’t inspect them?
What we do know, and what we can say for certain, is that Shannon Airport was used as a launching pad for four rendition operations involving the kidnappings of at least four people, Abu Omar, Khaled al Maqtari, Khaled el Masri and Binyam Mohamed. We have the dates and the flight logs to prove it.
Yet the Irish Government has consistently refused to address the issue and seems uninterested in whether CIA agents were breaking the law while flying through Shannon Airport.
For some people, this is all in the past, the legacy of the Bush administration and its so-called ‘war on terror’. There is a widespread belief that President Obama ended the practice of renditions but this is not the case.
One year ago President Obama signed an order to close Guantánamo Bay and to end the CIA’s programme of long-term secret detention. But he did not end extraordinary rendition.
So is Ireland still being used as a stop over for the CIA? We don’t know. But we do know that suspect planes are still using Shannon.
Only last month human rights activists monitoring planes landing at Shannon announced they have identified five planes that were previously involved in renditions operations using Shannon since March of last year, some of them on multiple occasions.
The UN Human Rights Committee, the Irish Human Rights Commission and the Council of Europe have all called on the Irish Government to inspect suspect flights using Shannon Airport.
In November 2008 the Government responded to growing public pressure by setting up a Cabinet committee to review the law and ensure Gardaí had the power to board and search suspected rendition flights.
Green Party TD Ciarán Cuffe said at the time that, “This marks a sea change in the way the Irish Government intends to approach the issue. It is a signal that this Government is taking human rights seriously”.
Over a year later there is still no sign of this review and the committee has only met twice. It is essential that the Government puts in place a procedure for inspecting flights through Irish airports. It is simply not good enough to rely on a foreign government to tell us what’s happening in our airports.
This week marks eight years since Guantánamo was opened. It must be closed and the remaining 200 or so prisoners released or given a fair trial. But it is only the tip of the iceberg. At least three dozen people believed to have been held in secret US detention centres are still missing. Neither their friends, nor their families know, where they are or what has happened to them.
The US has admitted that it has detained boys as young as thirteen in Guantánamo. Fathers and sons, bothers and loved ones, kidnapped, imprisoned and tortured with no access to their families, and denied a fair trial.
Another 500 prisoners remain in limbo at the US air base in Bagram, Afghanistan, and the Obama administration is appealing against the decision of a US judge to allow these men to challenge their ongoing detention.
No one has been brought to justice for acts of torture or enforced disappearances – both crimes under international law – committed by CIA agents.
Amnesty International Ireland has always been clear. Diplomatic assurances from President Bush were not good enough. They would not be good enough from President Obama. The responsibility to ensure Ireland is not used for illegal acts rests entirely with our Government.
We need to see the promised review of legislation governing searches of suspected rendition flights. The Taoiseach must announce when it will take place, ensure it is comprehensive, commit to making the findings public and to changing the law if necessary.
It is time to ensure we are never again accessories to kidnapping, imprisonment and torture.
The horrifying contents of the Dublin Archdiocese report and the sheer scale of the cover up have shocked Irish society even after the Ryan report last May and the Ferns report in 2005.
Bishops in Dublin colluded with child abusers, protecting them and hiding them, enabling them to prey on the innocent. Children were deliberately sacrificed to protect the Church and its money. In all, fourteen bishops were found to have failed in some way in the handling of cases of child abuse by priests.
Worst of all, it was the most vulnerable children who often the victims. Dublin’s poorest communities, places where people were less likely to challenge the men who called themselves spiritual leaders, were used as sanctuaries for abusers.
Priestly abusers raped and assaulted countless children, destroying lives, devastating families and the communities they were meant to support and guide. And yes, once again, Bishops knew, and did nothing.
Those who carried out these unspeakable atrocities can’t be allowed to get away with it. The Irish people, especially their victims, need to see them in a courtroom. They must face justice. Sadly it would appear that there is little possibility of those who covered up such crimes, who lied to and misled the public, who failed to report child abuse and rape to the police here in Ireland and who callously put self-interest and their own wealth ahead of the protection of children facing any criminal sanction in this state. It is another glaring example of failure on the part of our legis;ature that this is the case.
In 2005, when working with One in Four Ireland, I successfully campaigned for new laws that would criminalise such willful disregard for the protection of children by people in high positions of responsibility. But the law we won will not result in prosecutions of any bishop who covered up child abuse in the past. No law can be applied retrospectively.
The response of the Catholic Church to the report has been a complete failure of leadership. The only thing the bishops seem to know about responsibility and accountability is how to avoid them.
But this goes beyond Ireland. The Vatican and the Papal Nuncio, the Pope’s ambassador to Ireland, ignored requests for information from the inquiry. They have been largely silent since the report was published last week but our own Government seems unable, or perhaps unwilling, to challenge them.
If this State is no longer the servant of the Church, and if the days of deference to the Church by politicians and civil servants are truly over, then the Pope’s ambassador must be summoned by the Minister of Foreign Affairs to explain himself. If he was the Ambassador of any other State which had questions to answer about the rape and abuse of Irish children this would already have happened.
But we cannot pretend that this was all the fault of the Church. We must not point the finger at the clergy and say they, and they alone, are to blame. While we punish the guilty we cannot continue to avoid our own responsibility.
From Breakingnews.ie:
In a three-year inquiry, the Commission to Inquire into the Dublin Archdiocese uncovered a sickening tactic of “don’t ask, don’t tell” throughout the Church.“The Commission has no doubt that clerical child sexual abuse was covered up by the Archdiocese of Dublin and other Church authorities,” it said.
“The structures and rules of the Catholic Church facilitated that cover-up.
“The State authorities facilitated that cover-up by not fulfilling their responsibilities to ensure that the law was applied equally to all and allowing the Church institutions to be beyond the reach of the normal law enforcement processes.”
We don’t protect our children in Ireland.
More than three years ago the Ferns report revealed that the HSE has no powers to prevent abusers outside the family from having contact with children. Nothing has changed despite all the handwringing that followed Ferns.
When she was Minister for Education Mary Hanafin announced that the State, our Government, has no legal responsibility for what happens to our children in our schools.
This must change. In this State, if a company director breaks the law, he can be barred from being a director, but it seems that a Bishop who has been found to have covered up the rape of children can remain the patron of state funded schools and be left responsible for the safety of tens of thousands of children.
This is not about driving the Church out of our schools; this is about the State living up to its responsibilities and taking seriously its duty to protect our children.
Where the State fails to defend the rights of children then abuse and exploitation are often the result. Our children are our responsibility, and not the responsibility of any agency that places itself above the law. We can see now the consequences not only of cover up on the part of the Catholic Church, but also of the State’s failure to guarantee children’s rights and child protection.
So what are we going to do about it?
It is over ten years since Fianna Fáil came to power promising a referendum to put children’s rights at the heart of our Constitution. They said it was “a key priority”.
It was promised again in 2002 and again in 2007, and again when the revised programme for government was agreed with the Greens.
But the rights of children are not on the agenda in Government Buildings and won’t be until we force our politicians to put it there.
Unless our most fundamental law demands that we put children’s rights at the heart of the decisions we make they will remain targets for abuse and neglect. Our Government will simply wash its hands of them.
And it will be our fault, because we let them do it.
An article for the Irish Daily Mail, published on May 27th 2009.
They lied, at times by omission, at times by distorting the truth and at times just blatantly. The most senior leaders of the Catholic Church in Ireland lied to and deceived us all, and sacrificed children in the interests of their authority and most damningly, their money. Not terribly Christian of them was it? Can you imagine what Christ might say to Cardinal Desmond Connell and his fellow Bishops about their bizarre relationship with the truth and their willingness to turn the other way whilst children were raped and abused by their Priests?
Reading the Dublin Report was a shocking experience. Even after all these years, after all that I know about the scale and extent of the abuse and the cover up by Church leaders, I was profoundly shocked. The depth of the self-deluded and self-preserving betrayal of all that is decent by men sworn to a higher power and who placed themselves in positions where they told the rest of us we were flawed is staggering. In their world their lies are not lies, merely examples of ‘mental reservation’. Ever hear of that one? No? Well it means that an Archbishop can tell a blatant untruth as long as he lies by omission and then ‘reserves’ the missing words that would turn his lie into truth to himself, saying them only inside his own head.
So when Cardinal Connell failed to tell the truth, he didn’t lie. He just omitted the bits that would have been self-incriminating and said them to himself, inside his head. Children remained at risk and victims and their families were deceived. But that’s ok, because the Cardinal can tell himself he didn’t lie.
The State failed too of course. In traditional style, it deferred to the crosier. Too often, state officials, with some notable exceptions, failed to investigate credible reports of abuse and looked the other way, deferring to the majesty of the Church and its princes.
It may be the past, but this is not ancient history. The Commission investigated cases of abuse right up to 2004 when Cardinal Desmond Connell surrendered control of the Archdiocese of Dublin to Archbishop Diarmuid Martin.
Back in 2002 when I began to campaign on this issue, our Government didn’t believe the abuse of children by priests was any of its business. Asked for a comment of the Ferns scandal in March 2002, then Taoiseach Bertie Aherne retorted that is was a matter for the Church, and he wasn’t going to cross religion and politics.
Unsurprisingly Cardinal Connell agreed with him. The Church, he proclaimed, was above the law of the Land. Canon Law, the rules of the Roman Catholic Church was superior to state law. The State could not investigate the Church.
But the past is not some other country, or some faded reality with little relevance to us today. This history matters today. It affects the lives of not just those who experienced abuse, but all of us, most especially our children. It reveals huge flaws in our child protection law which leave children at risk today.
Back in October 2005 the Ferns Report found an alarming gap in Irish child protection law. Mr Justice Frank Murphy discovered that the HSE had no explicit legal power to act in cases of third-party child sexual abuse, i.e. cases where the abuser is not a family member. The HSE could investigate and validate the abuse, but once it had done so, the only power it had was to inform the employer of the abuser of the risk. It could do little to ensure that people who pose a risk to children were prevented from accessing children.
The Ferns Report recommended that the Minister for Health and Children explore the introduction of new legislation which would give the HSE power to apply to the High Court to restrain any employee, including a priest, from having unsupervised contact with children where a concern exists about his ability to interact safely with children.
The Dublin report again details the same gaps in our current child protection law, four years on from the publication of the Ferns Report.
Responding to the publication of the report, Minister for Children Barry Andrews said, “Judge Murphy in writing this report noted the extraordinary delay in introducing child protection legislation in this State. Successive Governments failed in their responsibilities as legislators to put in place a comprehensive child protection legislative framework.”
We now know the consequences of such delays. The four years which have passed since the publication of the Ferns Report is a current and unacceptable example of this, as is the delay to enshrine children’s rights in our constitution.
So enough of delays and apologies and procrastination, instead, it’s time for resolute action. Where the state fails to guarantee and defend the rights of children and abdicates responsibility for their safety, then abuse and exploitation are all too often the consequence. Our children are our responsibility, and not the responsibility of any agency which places itself outside or above the law. Today we see the consequences not only of cover up and deceit on the part of the Catholic Church, but also of state failure to guarantee children’s rights and child protection.
Yesterday was an important day, a day on which as Minister Andrews put it “Church and State respond with words of sincere and fulsome regret.”
And those are good words, but they remain just words. And they are not enough.
Colm O’Gorman is the author of Beyond Belief and the Executive Director of Amnesty International Ireland
An op ed I wrote for the Irish Daily Star which was published today. The report was published this afternoon. More to follow on the report later.
It can be downloaded here.
Even after the Ryan report last May and the Ferns Report in 2005, the contents of the Dublin Diocese report, the scale of the cover-up, will shock Irish society.
Bishops in Dublin colluded with child abusers, protecting them and hiding them, enabling them to prey on the innocent. Children were deliberately sacrificed to protect the Church. Dozens of priests and members of the clergy were involved.
Worst of all, it was the most vulnerable children who were the victims. Dublin’s poorest communities, places where people were less likely to challenge the men who called themselves spiritual leaders, were used as sanctuaries for abusers.
Priestly abusers raped and assaulted countless children, destroying lives, devastating families and the communities they were meant to support and guide. And yes, once again, Bishops knew, and did nothing.
Those who carried out these unspeakable atrocities can’t be allowed to get away with it. The Irish people, especially their victims, need to see them in a courtroom. They must face justice.
The Catholic Church in Ireland will never be the same after this report is published. But we cannot pretend that this was all the fault of the Church. We must not point the finger at the Church and say they, and they alone, are to blame.
While we punish the guilty we cannot continue to avoid our own responsibility.
We don’t protect our children in Ireland. We never have.
Over three years ago The Ferns Report revealed a shocking gap in Irish child protection law. It told us that the HSE have no powers to prevent abusers outside the family from having contact with children. The Dublin Report is likely to tell us that this is still true today; nothing has been done despite all the handwrining which followed Ferns.
When she was Minister for Education in 2006 Mary Hanafin announced that the state, our government, has no legal responsibility for what happens to our children in our schools.
It is over ten years since Fianna Fáil came to power promising a referendum that would put children’s rights at the heart of our Constitution. They said it was “a key priority”.
It was promised again in 2002 and in 2007, and again just a week ago when the revised programme for government was agreed with the Greens.
The rights of children are not on the agenda in Government Buildings and won’t be until we force our politicians to put it there.
Unless our most fundamental law demands that we put children’s rights at the heart of the decisions we make they will remain targets for abuse and neglect.
Our Government will simply wash its hands of them.
Until the next report.
Because make no mistake, unless we act, we’ll be back here again.
The article below is my response to an opinion piece in the Evening Herald a week or so ago, link to that here, and comments by Cardinal Sean Brady at the weekend, link to that story here.
I thought it might be worth posting here as well.
Irish people want equality for everyone — gay or straight. It’s time Cardinal Seán Brady caught up
Originally appeared in The Evening Herald on Tuesday August 25 2009
Speaking on the proposed Civil Partnership Bill, Cardinal Sean Brady has stressed the importance of providing children with an “ideal environment” in which to grow.
But the real problem with the legislation as it stands is that it denies that environment to the children of same-sex couples. It undermines their right to a family.
Adoption is a children’s rights issue and not an issue of the human rights of the adults who parent them. Nobody has the ‘right’ to adopt. Adoption must only be considered from the perspective of the rights of children. Children are not objects to be acquired by adults.
Gay people can already adopt in Ireland and have done so. There is no restriction on adoption in this State based on sexual orientation. But a gay couple cannot jointly adopt a child. This is not because they are gay. It is because they are unmarried. An unmarried couple, gay or straight, cannot jointly adopt either. But a straight couple can choose to get married. They can then jointly adopt a child. This is a choice denied to gay couples here but not to couples in the North.
In Europe, joint or second parent adoption by same-sex partners currently exists in the Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, Germany and Britain.
For me, the whole issue raises a number of questions.
Why is it okay for a gay person to adopt a child by him or herself but not to jointly adopt a child as part of a couple in a loving relationship? Why is it acceptable that a gay couple can raise a child together and give that child a loving family home, but not for the child to have a legal, secure relationship with both parents?
And, perhaps most importantly, why should the children of gay couples have inferior rights to the children of a married, heterosexual couple? Is that truly in the best interests of the child? Will this create an “ideal environment” for those children? In all the speeches and arguments on this issue, I have never seen those who are arguing against equality answer any of these questions. I’ve never even seen them try.
Denial
How can we in conscience allow the denial of the rights of children cared for by same-sex parents to be deliberately written into Irish law?
The issue at the heart of Minister Ahern’s proposed legislation is not gay marriage or ‘gay’ adoption. It is discrimination. It is saying that the right to marry only applies to some people and not to others. But that’s not true.
The right to marry is contained in Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in Article 23 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Both treaties have very strong anti-discrimination clauses that make it crystal clear that the rights contained in them apply to all people, regardless of their status.
This was reiterated by the 1994 decision of the UN Human Rights Committee, charged with interpreting the ICCPR, in Toonen v Australia, which found that sexual orientation was a protected status in human rights law, the same as race or gender.
So let us be very clear on this. Refusing to allow a couple to marry because they are gay is a violation of their human rights.
Opponents of equality try to deny marriage rights to gay couples by arguing that marriage is about children, about creating and supporting secure families for children. But then these same people oppose extending the same security and care to children parented by same-sex couples as other children.
The argument is so illogical it seems to be based on denying the very existence of children parented by same-sex couples. Surely we have learned the cost of denying rights and protections to any particular group of children?
Some commentators, and Minister Ahern seems to agree with them, have made the argument that Ireland is not ready for equality. Thing is, the Irish people themselves seem to disagree.
According to a Lansdowne survey carried out for Marriage Equality earlier this year, 81pc of Irish people believe that everyone living in Ireland should receive equal treatment from the state regardless of whether they are lesbian, straight or gay.
Significantly, 75pc believed that the children of same-sex couples should have the same family rights as other children.
Six out of 10 believe that denying marriage to lesbians and gay men is an act of discrimination.
Marriage is a fundamental human right to which we are all, gay and straight, entitled. Those arguing against equality are profoundly out of touch with mainstream Irish opinion.
Maybe it’s now time that they caught up.
India took a big step forward recently its High Court ruled against a 149 year old law dating back to the Raj and decriminalised homosexuality.
The ruling last Thursday overturned a 148-year-old british colonial law which described a same-sex relationship as an “unnatural offence”.
Homosexual acts were punishable by a 10-year prison sentence. The Indian parliment is now expected to repeal the legislation.
Media comment in India has been overwhelmingly positive.
The Times of India said “..this historic ruling could act as a catalyst, encouraging our legislators to shed their blinkers and take a more progressive view on the issue,” the newspaper said.
“In 21st century India, it is perverse to penalise adults for their sexual choices.”
But not everyone views the development as pregressive and welcome. The ruling may also have the effect of bringing together different religious leaders for the first time in India. It has been reported that Muslim, Hindu and Christian leaders may unite for the first time to oppose the ruling. More here.
And there I was thinking the concept of a loving God was central to all faiths?
Silly me.
Nothing like good old fashioned bigotry to bring people together eh?
In 1948, in a global effort to ensure that the inhumanity of the Second World War would never happen again, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)was passed and adopted by the United Nations without a single dissenting voice.
Colm O’Gorman, Executive Director of Amnesty International Irish Section, in association with RTE Radio 1’s Drivetime programme, broadcast a series of radio columns, one dedicated to each article of the Declaration, to bring this historical and foundational document to life, demonstrating how central and relevant it is to our everyday lives.
Article 27: Everyone has the right to take part in the cultural life of their community and the right to benefit from scientific and artistic learning
History has shown how economic hardship can bring out the worst in human beings. As Ireland deals with the new economic climate, Colm O’Gorman urges for a greater collective effort to work for a truly global recovery
Colm O'Gorman
In 1948, in a global effort to ensure that the inhumanity of the Second World War would never happen again, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)was passed and adopted by the United Nations without a single dissenting voice.
Colm O’Gorman, Executive Director of Amnesty International Irish Section, in association with RTE Radio 1’s Drivetime programme, broadcast a series of radio columns, one dedicated to each article of the Declaration, to bring this historical and foundational document to life, demonstrating how central and relevant it is to our everyday lives.
23rd May 2008
Article 3: Everyone has the right to life and the right to live in freedom and safety
Imagine a world where stopping to play with a can by the side of the road can cost you your legs and your cousin his life. Colm O’Gorman speaks about meeting Soraj, a 17-year-old survivor from Afghanistan who is playing a pivotal role fighting for an international treaty to ban the use of cluster bombs.
Colm O'Gorman
In 1948, in a global effort to ensure that the inhumanity of the Second World War would never happen again, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)was passed and adopted by the United Nations without a single dissenting voice.
Colm O’Gorman, Executive Director of Amnesty International Irish Section, in association with RTE Radio 1’s Drivetime programme, broadcast a series of radio columns, one dedicated to each article of the Declaration, to bring this historical and foundational document to life, demonstrating how central and relevant it is to our everyday lives.
Eleanor Roosevelt once said that human rights begin in ‘small places’. In the first of a series of Drivetime radio columns celebrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Colm O’Gorman introduces the UDHR and explains how our human rights begin in the home, the school, the hospital and our local community.
Colm O'Gorman
