Speaker Michael O’Flaherty

Event Watch his talk

FRA Director, Michael O'Flaherty, joins leading voices for a TedTalk in Varese on 6 November where he shared his vision of human rights and innovation for a more inclusive and sustainable future.

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and in rights.

These are the words from Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human

Rights. For me these words are a fact, a vision and a challenge.

A fact because I believe that is exactly how we are born - free and equal. A vision because we have so far to go to realize that fact in reality in our World. And I will come back in just a few moments to why I see the words as a challenge.

Let me begin by sharing with you some memories from my life of when I have seen the astonishing power of human rights to transform lives.

I was in Bosnia during the war there and I saw how human rights standards and human rights institutions played such a central role in establishing the peace.

A few years later, I was in Sierra Leone during the Civil War there. I saw how legal arguments, human rights arguments, made by my colleagues and myself helped save lives. They helped for instance save people from being executed.

Some years later, I worked in Northern Ireland. There I saw how a police force that was once seen as an instrument of oppression was transformed by putting human rights at its corporate heart.

All of us every day see how our societies are changed by human rights. Take my own country Ireland. It was repeated judgments of the European Court of Human Rights that changed my society for the better. For instance, by the decriminalization of same-sex sexual activity.

In 2022, we saw how the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to a group of activists from Ukraine, Belarus and Russia who were fired up by human rights, by its vision driving them in their vital work.

What is this human rights that I am speaking about? It is a very old story, long in development. You could go back to 2500 years ago in Persia to see the origins of human rights. But the key date for us today is the 10th of December 1948 with the adoption by the United Nations General Assembly of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Adopted from a draft that was put together by authors from across the world. From the Declaration followed all those treaties and institutions that we see today here in Europe and across the world.

You can sum up the essence of this human rights machinery with four foundational principles. The first is that human rights engage all of our lived experience, all aspects of our lives. For sure it is about freedom of speech, it is about privacy. But it is also about our socioeconomic well-being. It is about basic issues of social security, such as shelter and health care.

The second dimension is that while some rights are absolute - you can never be enslaved for instance – most rights are subject to limitation in the public good. This is essential if we are to have societies and communities. We also had to limit our own rights in the context of the coronavirus pandemic.

A third, very important dimension of the modern-day human rights system is that it is law. It is binding on States, it imposes duties on governments. That means that you can go into a courtroom and have your rights stood up for by the judges.

The fourth and the final dimension of these basic principles is the unique quality of the human rights system. There is nothing else like it. It is the only universally shared roadmap or language to show the way to honour human dignity and human values in our societies. Or to put it another way, there is no plan B.

Where is this astonishing achievement today in confrontation with the enormous challenges we see in our world?

This is arguably the most challenging moment for our human rights that we have seen in many generations. We have the war in Ukraine, the horror that it is inflicting for the people of Ukraine as well as for people right across the world. You have the story of Covid - not just the disease, the pandemic, but also our own responses to it.

We are in the end days of the climate crisis. Our future is at stake if we do not move quickly and smartly. We have a rampant crisis of disinformation across our societies – lies driving debate with terrible consequences for our institutions.

We are only now recognizing the legacy of colonialism and how so many of the problems we confront in the world today are in part because of that colonial history. Very closely related to that, we have shocking levels of inequality. The poor getting ever poorer, the rich getting ever more distant from the very poor.

In this moment of grave crisis, where is human rights? To at least some extent, it is missing in action. We do not see human rights at the centre of the responses to fix our societies and to advance them. Very often we see governments treating human rights like a buffet. I take those rights, that is useful. I will leave those rights behind on the buffet, they are just inconvenient.

Still worse, we are seeing a new a rejection of rights from some politicians and even some governments, saying: “I do not believe in those rights, we will no longer stay committed to those treaties.”

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