In 2021, I wrote the publication for a abbreviated (2 minute) animated video task connected the worth of each person’s beingness and the inherent, adjacent dignity of all. It revealed to beryllium hard to find an creator to collaborate with in-person during the pandemic. Eventually, I crossed (virtual) paths with Daryna Kudenko, a Ukrainian creator with expertise successful video animation. Daryna and I unluckily mislaid interaction soon aft Russia’s penetration of Ukraine. This is the past connection Daryna sent to maine earlier escaping:
Darynakudenko Feb. 24, 10:36 a.m.
Hello Fabrizia! I americium precise pleased that you wrote to me, immoderate enactment is needed now. Yes today, astatine 5 a.m. Russia attacked us, present determination are battles. We can’t get away, it is simply a full-scale war. but I inactive person the Internet and I tin work, I anticipation everything volition beryllium fine, but each Ukrainians are successful daze and grief. It’s ironic that I’m doing present a cartoon astir the worth of quality life.
Thankfully, Daryna and I were capable to reconnect and implicit the task of which the cardinal connection is: It’s lone by valuing quality beingness and fostering attitudes of respect and justness for each radical that it becomes imaginable to combat against racism and immoderate different signifier of discrimination. It’s lone done the cosmopolitan connection of the centrality of the quality idiosyncratic that is imaginable to support and beforehand quality rights.
The conception of quality rights has evolved from a contented that stretches backmost much than 2,500 years.
In 539 B.C., Cyrus the Great, the archetypal king of past Persia, conquered the metropolis of Babylon. What helium did adjacent marked a large beforehand for humanity. He freed slaves, declared that radical had the close to take their ain religion and established radical equality. These and different decrees were recorded successful what is known contiguous arsenic the Cyrus Cylinder, a baked-clay cylinder successful Akkadian language. This past grounds has been recognized arsenic the world’s archetypal charter of quality rights.
From Babylon, the thought of quality rights dispersed to the East and to the West, yet reaching Rome. There, the conception of “natural law’ arose based connected the reflection that radical followed definite unwritten laws oregon maxims derived from the quality of things. Later successful history, documents asserting idiosyncratic rights, specified arsenic the Magna Carta (1215), the Petition of Rights (1628), the U.S. Constitution (1787), the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) and the U.S. Bill of Rights (1791), became the written precursors to modern quality rights declarations.
In 1948, the United Nations’ Human Rights Commission, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, acceptable retired to draught the 30 articles that became the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Many of these rights person go portion of the law laws of antiauthoritarian nations. But, arsenic Eleanor Roosevelt noted:
“Where, aft all, bash cosmopolitan quality rights begin? In tiny places, adjacent to location – truthful adjacent and truthful tiny that they cannot beryllium seen connected immoderate maps of the world. Yet they are the satellite of the idiosyncratic person; the vicinity helium lives in; the schoolhouse oregon assemblage helium attends; the factory, workplace oregon bureau wherever helium works. Such are the places wherever each man, pistillate and kid seeks adjacent justice, adjacent opportunity, adjacent dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights person meaning there, they person small meaning anywhere. Without acrophobic national enactment to uphold them adjacent to home, we shall look successful vain for advancement successful the larger world.”
I anticipation the video “The Person astatine the Center” volition beryllium an accidental to bespeak connected our lives, connected however we are each interconnected, however we are each deserving of respect, dignity and opportunities, and however we each person the aforesaid inalienable rights.
By Dr. Fabrizia Faustinella, prof successful the Department of Family and Community Medicine, Baylor College of Medicine
English (US)